Bethel Valley History: Part 4

BETHEL VALLEY INTERVIEWS:
MAUDE LANE, S.E. COLEY, DOROTHY MONEYMAKER, BARBARA MCCALL-ELY,
VELMA BLANK, AND DOT ANDERSON BUSSELL
1998
Interviewer Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
INTERVIEWER: What was your favorite thing to do as a kid?
INTERVIEWEE 1: What was my favorite thing as a kid?
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your childhood around here. What did you do as the child of a farmer?
INTERVIEWEE 1: Well we made our own wagons and we rode over the hills and climbed trees and swung out of them and fell. I could hold my own with any of those boys. I could shoot a gun as good as they could. They didn’t bother me. We’ll put it that way. We played in the creek all the time. My oldest brother threw me in the creek one time and told me to sink or swim. I can remember sitting on the bottom of that creek. I sunk. (laughter) We just fought and scratched and stayed hidden from Mom so we didn’t have to do anything.
INTERVIEWER: Was it the watering hole?
INTERVIEWEE 1: No, it was White Oak Creek, down there. We played in it all the time, chased snakes and whatever.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t have to spend a lot of money to do this.
INTERVIEWEE 1: No we didn’t. We didn’t have any money; we didn’t know what money was. We had very little money.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t have to ride around in cars.
INTERVIEWEE 1: No we fell in the creek.
INTERVIEWER: What was courting like back in those days?
INTERVIEWEE 1: Well I don’t know. I wasn’t old enough. I was 12 I think, when we moved out. My mother didn’t allow me to look at a boy.
INTERVIEWER: What were some of the games the girls played?
INTERVIEWEE 1: We played the same games the boys did: kicked the old tin can, Annie over, hopscotch. I can’t think of anything else. We had the hoop and wheel. Shoot marbles. I used to be a good shot at marbles. Jump rope, hot pepper and all that. We went to a one-room school all eight grades. I can’t remember all my teachers. Eula Arnold was my first teacher: Autumn Ladd was my second teacher. I can’t remember the rest. There was one I didn’t like. I could tell you that name, but I don’t want to. I guess that is about it.
INTERVIEWER: What do you remember of when the government came in and told your folks they were taking the property?
INTERVIEWEE 1: Well, it was a scary time because we couldn’t find anywhere to move to. We were one of the last families that moved out. We had one old cow that we just turned her loose and we would go up and down this valley late in the afternoon and we’d find her. We rode the mules and would find her. We had one old mule if you fell off of her, you walked home because she stood still until you’d get up from under her feet and she left you. We moved out here when I was in the seventh grade. I went half a year at Wheat and then I went to Harriman. Finished my school at Harriman. Then I went some to Roane State but I didn’t graduate.
INTERVIEWER: Do you remember if you could take everything that you wanted to take with you?
INTERVIEWEE 1: No, they wouldn’t let my mother take any of her flowers and it broke her heart. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let her. They were just going to plow them up. They just wouldn’t let her. Other than that, we took what we wanted. As far as I know. I can’t remember much about it.
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MS. LANE: My best friend’s husband ran it.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about the rolling store.
MS. LANE: He came twice a week and we had to walk across this little hill right down here. We lived way down yonder at the gap of the ridge. My brothers had a little red wagon which was a treasure to us, because you didn’t get one of those very often. My mother or maybe one of the other children would come and haul our stuff back in the little red wagon. When the creek got up, we didn’t get there. She couldn’t get across it. I remember having to walk all that way to catch the school bus to go to high school too, in all types of weather, before we got the bus to come by the house. Our mailman didn’t come by the house either. We had to walk a mile and a half to the mailbox out on the other end, way down yonder. As Ms. Moneymaker’s people was our mailman and they rode a horse. It was a long time before they ever got a car that would come. We never did get the mail to come by our house, before we had to move out. We got the school bus, but the mailman didn’t come by. We still had to walk.
INTERVIEWER: So you did a lot of walking.
MS. LANE: We did. We had to walk a mile and a half to school and back in all kinds of weather. I can remember my brother over there, was born with asthma and the school teacher, one day, it was raining when it was time to go home. She took the curtain down off the windows in the school house and wrapped him up in it so he could walk home and not get wet. We’d a had to walk or stay there.
INTERVIEWER: What did you do when it snowed?
MS. LANE: We didn’t get there.
INTERVIEWER: But you had a school bus.
MS. LANE: Not if it was very deep then they didn’t, because the teacher couldn’t get there either, because she was way down in the country. All the cars just didn’t make it. She had a car, but not many people did at that time. We went to church in a horse and buggy. Finally, when Dad got a car, he gave us the little old buggy and we took everything off of it but the frame and the wheels. We had fun riding down the hills on it. I remember my dad’s youngest brother, he was just a little older than I was. There was a big hill that came down from our house and there was a bridge that went over a little branch. There was a big hole at one end of the bridge, but the wire fence came across to keep the cattle in. He was coming down through there. He was having himself a time. He went off the end of the bridge and hung himself on the barbed wire fence. He like to kill himself. He was a character anyhow.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you had a beau?
MS. LANE: 21.
INTERVIEWER: Were you still living at home?
MS. LANE: Yes. Me and my brother were there and my son was the last one. The last load that went out. We were the last family that moved out.
INTERVIEWER: What were your feelings when [inaudible].
MS. LANE: It was kind of sad because the two girls over there, we grew up together, adjoining farms with just a creek between our properties. We were going one way and they were going another and we never knew when we were going to see each other again. It’s kind of sad.
INTERVIEWER: Did you understand?
MS. LANE: Not really. I didn’t understand what was going on up there until my brother grew up big enough to work up there. And it was not long before we had to move. Of course, most of the young men out of there went into the Army. About a week after Pearl Harbor, about every eligible man volunteered and was gone.
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever ask any questions about why this happened?
MS. LANE: You didn’t get very many answers. We were just told that it was going to help the war efforts. My dad had gotten a job in Oakdale Car Shop, he called it then. The railroad over there. He worked there for years and years. He would leave sometimes like on a Monday morning and we wouldn’t see him until maybe the middle of the week, when all the troop trains were going through. He would have to stay and work them out. They had a little, what they called commissary over there where he worked. What little sleep he got, that’s where he did it. I may have been the oldest when I had to help Mother with the rest of them. We lived way out in the country and they went to a little one-room school. Of course, that’s where I went until I was old enough to go to the high school.
INTERVIEWER: Did you feel as though your family’s personality changed as a result of the move?
MS. LANE: It did. We didn’t even have electricity until we moved out of there. Our refrigeration was a spring, right down over there, that comes out from under the hill, is where we kept our stuff, or a cellar under the house. We could take our milk and butter that we didn’t want to spoil and Mother put it in crocks. I don’t know if you know what a crock is or not, but Mother would put it down in that and put a lid on top of it, set it down in the branch and nobody bothered it. Everybody’s was marked and everybody knew who’s they was and nobody bothered. That was one thing you didn’t do, was go around bothering other people’s property.
INTERVIEWER: Had your family been out here over many generations?
MS. LANE: My great-grandfather owned the farm. It was two farms and he divided it between my father and one of my uncles. My other grandfather’s farm joined this one. My great-grandfather I never saw, but my Grandfather Justice lived with us for a while.
INTERVIEWER: So a lot of farms were connected with the family connections.
MS. LANE: Yes. Way back, most of them. Some were inherited back many generations. Ours was 81 acres. All together, I don’t remember how much it all was before it was split.
INTERVIEWER: Was there a lot of cooperative growing back then?
MS. LANE: Right smart of it, yes. That little fat one over there I always had to take care of. He was a handful. I either had to go to the field with the two oldest boys or stay at the house with him and my sister, and Mother went.
INTERVIEWER: So you didn’t get to travel much.
MS. LANE: No, the closest town was Oliver Springs or Harriman and it was about equal distance to either one of them. There was no such thing as a movie theater. We made our own entertainment and we enjoyed it. Really did. We usually met at somebody’s house on the weekends and we would make molasses candy or popcorn balls. Some of the boys had guitars and mandolins and fiddles, and we would have music to dance or something like that.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of music did you dance to back then?
MS. LANE: Hillbilly. It was very hillbilly. Our entertainment was mostly when we had. Sometimes we had a three weeks revival. That was day and night because everybody went to it first thing in the morning, and then before 11 go to church, and then go back to work until five at night. Thank you.
[Break in video]
INTERVIEWER: S.E., how old were you when your family was told that, 1942-1943, to move out of here?
MR. COLEY: I was somewhere near 13. I was born in 1928 and we left here in ‘42. That would make me right at 14, I guess. Somewhere in that neighborhood.
INTERVIEWER: So you lived here how long?
MR. COLEY: I was born here, right down in that gap down there.
INTERVIEWER: What were some of the things that boys did around here other than doing farm chores?
MR. COLEY: There wasn’t very much except go to church, go to school and work. That is about all you did. I was telling Don, it’s a good thing in a way, I guess, to have started this project. We’d a sat here and we’d still be down there trying to make a living on those little poor acres. See it forced us all to leave here and go to different places, go to different schools, get different jobs, and what have you. Probably in a way, it might have been a good thing, but we didn’t think so at the time.
INTERVIEWER: Where did you move to?
MR. COLEY: We went to Harriman. Just across the river there in Harriman over there. See Dad left here before us and started work at Southern Railway.
[Break in video]
INTERVIEWER: You lived in the Wheat Community?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Yes. My people had lived in there for at least four generations before the government took it. The community of Wheat was named for the first postmaster of the community. His name was Henry Franklin Wheat. He was my first generation uncle. It was a little amusing that my grandfather was a mail carrier and he delivered mail back in Bethel Valley, Bear Creek Valley and all the others. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he went a certain route and the other three days of the week he went the other. Now he wouldn’t leave his mail bag on the horse and get off to go eat. There weren’t any restaurants, so he had to eat at somebody’s house. But the women would prepare the food and take it out to him and he’d sit on his horse and he’d eat his meal. Then his son, my father, Smith Sellers, was the mail carrier also, course he did it in a Model T Ford. And the amusing thing is that I have a nephew that was a mail carrier out in California. I think that’s a little amusing.
INTERVIEWER: How many people lived in the Wheat Community?
MS. MONEYMAKER: I have no idea, but it wasn’t a large community. The main part of the community was where the school and the churches were, but it spread out and included all the people around about there. Lord, I have no idea how many people there were. The Reverend George Jones, the church that still stands is named for him. When he died he gave to, I think it was 256 acres, I could be wrong about the number, in my book, I tell it but I don’t remember exactly, he gave that property and it was farm property, mostly for religion and education. The old Roane College was up on the hill from where that church building still stands. After the Civil War, the state of Tennessee did not have a Department of Education for quite some time. After they did get organized again, the College was donated to the state and it became Wheat High School at the corner of where the Turnpike and Blair Road come together. The land that Mister, Reverend Jones left had 22 houses on it, besides the church. Anyone that wanted to get an education, I had someone in the family to go, or that wanted to work in the school system or wanted to be a pastor, could live there free of charge in those houses. It’s amusing to think that the water was furnished them also, because they had to go to the spring to go get it. It was that way and it was still. In other words, when the government took the property, it didn’t belong to the people that lived in those houses. It was whatever legal process that had to go on.
INTERVIEWER: How big was the school?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Do you mean number-wise?
INTERVIEWER: Well, yeah, and the size of the building. Was it a one-room school house?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Oh no. It was a great big school house. They had added to it. When I was in high school, they added a back to it that was bigger than what was already there. It provided education for anyone that wanted to come. They had a girls’ dormitory and a boys’ dormitory and they could live there for a very small amount and get their education. Many people from surrounding communities, even some that had high schools [in their communities] came to Wheat because it was an accredited high school. After it became the high school, instead of Roane College, it was an accredited school and people would come and stay there so they could go to college. Many of the people, well I’ll name one family especially, all the Christenberry Knoxville lawyers and doctors came from the Wheat community, and the older ones had gone to Roane College.
INTERVIEWER: The area was primarily farms.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Yes, it was. In fact, there was practically nothing but farming. Then there were a lot of peach orchards that hired people during the harvest season and that gave us teenagers money to spend that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
INTERVIEWER: Now if you went into the little town of Wheat itself, I am assuming there was a doctor in town.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Well for quite some time there was a doctor that served. There was a, let’s see, in my book I tell all of them. I remember Dr. Carl. Then they came to the place where they didn’t have one in the community. You had to go to Oliver Springs or Harriman, that was after traveling was no difficulty. For a long time Dr. Carl lived right in the community and Dr. Nice lived over toward Dyllis and he could get there in little to no time. He was a minister as well as a doctor.
INTERVIEWER: Did people go to the big towns like Knoxville a lot back then?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Oh yes. If you wanted to go and buy fine clothes, you had to go to Knoxville.
INTERVIEWER: What about the transportation back then? Where there a lot of cars on the road, or was it still horse and buggies?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Well there were a few horses. A few people rode horseback. Most of the people, when I was growing up, had a car. I’m 83, so that was a long time back there. I want to tell you something I remember as I was growing up. At a certain time of the year, and I guess it was the fall of the year, but I’m not for sure about that. They would have a drive of animals to the Knoxville market. Most of the time it was cattle. They would start, I don’t know where they started, but any farmer that added to it, added to it as they went up. My daddy would point it out to me and the way that they would was, they would have one person from that farm with their group of animals and they would go up by our house to Knoxville. One time, they had some sheep with them and I was just amazed. You know you drive cattle, but you lead sheep. It never had meant anything to me at all, when I had read the Bible about it in the 23rd Psalm. It had never meant anything to me until I saw that man leading his sheep instead of driving them.
INTERVIEWER: Would you like to talk about anything that I haven’t asked you so far?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Let me tell you a little funny thing that happened when I was in, they called it primary back then, instead of… you going to turn that on?
INTERVIEWER: It’s on.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Ok. I’m going to tell you a funny thing. They called it primary class then instead of kindergarten. They had desks that two students could sit in, and my first cousin and I were sitting together. Two of our friends, boy friends were sitting behind us. I will not give their names. Ms. Effie Driscoll was our teacher and Mary Bella and me got to laughing. So Ms. Effie took us out into the hall and asked what we were laughing about. We wouldn’t tell her. Three times that morning she took us out and the last time she made us sit down on the floor and sit there until lunch time. Now I’m going to tell her why we were laughing. The boys behind us were talking dirty talk, and we weren’t allowed to say those dirty words, so we weren’t able to tell Ms. Effie what we were laughing about.
INTERVIEWER: When kids grew up here did they stay here or did they move away.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Well many moved away. Many also inherited the family farm. Then people that would work in those peach orchards all year long, not the harvest time, but all year long, they usually lived in houses that were on the property of who owned the orchards. I think there were four big peach orchards and they were shipped. They went over to Dyllis and that’s where they put them on the train. You might be interested about what went on in the community after the Norris Dam was build. The community of Wheat was incorporated after that. They raised their crops and then put them all together and sold them all together, not just from each farmer, which gained them more. Also we would have, well, the agriculture and the Home Demonstration women. The men and women would meet once a month as transportation got better, the dormitories were not used and we made a community center out of it. We would have lunch together and talk about what we needed to learn to improve our manner of living and men talked about how to improve their harvest crops, so they could get more out of them when they sold them. I never questioned this. Somehow they all brought it all together to the community center and then it was shipped out so that it was all shipped out together. Then the money was paid out to each individual. I never questioned it, but it was all right.
INTERVIEWER: When you were 27, 28-years-old, you were told to move. What was your first reaction when you were told to pack up everything and leave?
MS. MONEYMAKER: We were sort of scared. I had been married, we had been married almost eight years at the time, and my husband was farming a farm. We didn’t know what we were going to do. To make it even worse, they didn’t tell us when they would pay us and how much we would be paid. That made it very difficult. It was also during the war time. We were selling eggs to a hatchery in Knoxville, which they came and collected each week and milk, cream off of the milk, cows too when it got time. Of course, that income was stopped when the government took it, because they were not allowed to come in. We were suppose to get out the last of December. I’m going to tell you an ugly thing I did. My husband was already working for the government here in Oak Ridge, but they still made us move. We didn’t get out by the last day of December ’42, so they served eviction papers. Well, tried to serve the eviction papers on us. We were expecting our first child. We had, I had an idea all of a sudden. I said to the man that was standing in front of my living room door, “Didn’t you know that there was a law in the state of Tennessee that says you could not evict a pregnant woman?” He was so scared that he took his papers with him and jumped off the front porch and they never came back. We didn’t get out until April of 1943. However, we had had our baby during that time and the doctor had to come from Oliver Springs and had to get a pass for me to get out to go to Harriman to have the baby. I don’t know what in the world they would have done if I had decided to have it a little quicker.
INTERVIEWER: So you were all ready, even though you hadn’t been moved out, you had already been isolated.
MS. MONEYMAKER: That’s right. The closest person still within the community, within the area was eight miles from us. Security would drive by and they would stop and stare at your house if somebody was in it. One day, they had cut off our water system and had filled up the well that was at our house and so I was having to use water from a spring branch across the road. One day, he was coming and he stopped and stared at me. I was washing over there in the branch. He said, “Lady, what are you doing?” Now, during that time of our life, your baby’s diapers were not pull ups. They were cloth. And I told him plain and flat what I was washing out of those diapers. I’ll not tell it on television, (laughter)
INTERVIEWER: Did they tell you why they were moving you out?
MS. MONEYMAKER: No they didn’t tell you anything but to get.
INTERVIEWER: Did anybody ever challenge those saying that they were going to take it to court?
MS. MONEYMAKER: I know one family who did take it to court. They went ahead and moved out and took it to court. They didn’t win anything. It went on about 18 months before it was settled. They would have been better off to have moved out and taken what they were giving them and let it go. It was about six to 12 months before anyone was notified as to what they would get. I would be amused to tell you, when I started to write that book, the Department of Energy gave me a list of the people who moved and the amount of acreage they had, but they would not let me see what they gave them for their land. Which was alright with me except that I happen to know that one of the places and I will not name it. (I would love to, but I won’t.) They got $33 an acre. If they were going to sell some of that land now, it would be something like $33,000 an acre. Oh, and let me tell you something about where X-10 sits. An agriculture teacher, Evan Hagger, owned it. It was a marvelous farm. Beside his cattle and so forth, he would tame wild animals. He taught at the Wheat High School agriculture and once a year he would bring his agriculture boys’ and the Home Demonstration girls’ classes over here to his farm and we would have a picnic for the day. We got to pet all those wild animals and he would tell us about everything. It was what you would call a perfect farm. When he had go to UT [University of Tennessee] having gone after he fought in World War I, they needed him up there one day. The man that was suppose to have demonstrated about how honeybees got sick. They asked Mr. Hagger to do it and he did it in a bathing suit with all those bees. They didn’t sting him.
INTERVIEWER: When you moved, where did you go?
MS. MONEYMAKER: I went to Rockwood. My mother’s father had died and my mother inherited a part of the farm that he had owned. Because none of us had any money or knew what we were going to have. We moved into the buildings that were there and of course, she took that part of the farm as her inheritance. We lived there 18 years. Then when the city took over from the government, because my husband was working for the city, we were required to move back in and we did.
INTERVIEWER: To Oak Ridge.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Did they ever give any indication to you maybe eventually you would get your land back?
MS. MONEYMAKER: They told us we would. When they no longer needed it, it would be returned to us.
INTERVIEWER: And obviously that didn’t happen.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Why of course not. That’s what you would expect from the government.
INTERVIEWER: You were never allowed back in.
MS. MONEYMAKER: No, where I grew up is behind restricted. I could have inherited it if I wanted it, but I don’t want it. I would be a miserable mess with a farm.
INTERVIEWER: Have you ever been back into that area at all?
MS. MONEYMAKER: We got permission to go, I think, twice. We went once so that my niece, who now lives with me, could go back in.
INTERVIEWER: Anything else you would want to tell us about.
MS. MONEYMAKER: I could tell you a whole lot more, but I won’t. I would love to tell you some of the dirty stuff. But that wouldn’t do.
INTERVIEWER: Do you detect any bitterness toward the government for being taken off your land?
MS. MONEYMAKER: No, there is no bitterness.
[Break in video]
MS. MCCALL-ELY: Are you ready?
INTERVIEWER: Barbara, tell me exactly where you grew up?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: I grew up in the K-25 area. My granddaddy’s Smith Sellers’ farm. My home place was 200 years old. It was started by Alexander Smith, which, just back in the mountain there, they had just put a hovel there. Then when his daughter, my great-grandmother, came with her husband there, they added some logs and made a little bit better home. Then in front of that, when my granddaddy and grandmother, Smith Sellers and his wife came, they put in some wood, of course, and built more on the home because they had a bigger family. Then, when I was little, they had added more onto the house. We had an upstairs, as well as a big basement where we kept all the potatoes, and Granddaddy kept blackberries, well, I guess you would call it wine now, but it was blackberries fermented. My brother and I went down there one time and got so drunk we couldn’t get up the steps. But anyway, we liked that blackberry wine. It was supposed to be used medicinally, but it wasn’t. But anyway, and we had, in other words a three story home. We had an old spring house that we kept our milk in. It had artesian springs under it. We went to, we kept our milk and butter in there. To me, we had a beautiful home. It was 200 years old. So when my great-grandmother had to leave in 1943, she was in her 80’s. It was difficult for her. It was her granddaddy’s place originally, and she never quite understood why she had to leave, even though my granddaddy said, “Ma, we got to go.” And he would say to us kids, as the government would come in and knock on our walls. I don’t know why. They wanted to see how sound our houses were. They would knock on them. My brother, Barry, was not very nice, but he kicked one on the shin and said, “Get out of my house.” But anyway, when we started to leave home, my brother and I wanted to take the “Edgewood” sign from our home place because that was put up there by our folks. We were at the edge of several woods. My brother said, “Granddaddy, lift me up and let us get the sign. We’ll keep that.” As Granddaddy lifted him up, a government man came and said, “You can’t have that. It’s in our pictures.” I guess that’s the reason my brother never comes home. He can’t stand it. Anyway, we moved to Rockwood, the Cartive area of Rockwood. When we stepped on the porch where my, (thank goodness, my great-grandfather Stubbs had some property and some land, and he moved a renter out of there) when my brother and I stepped on the porch the first time, it gave way, under our feet. This was not something that we could understand. They had given us $39 an acre for our home and we had to go there because we hadn’t even been paid, and didn’t know when we’d get paid. But Granddaddy kept saying this was going to bring our boys home. Sidney Arnold was killed shortly thereafter. Gene and I said to Granddaddy, “I thought this was going to bring Sidney and all of them home, and now Sidney won’t come home.” Granddaddy said, “The Lord knows best and we must live with that.” I was only a teenager. They said teenagers have stress now. But I still enjoy my mountains. I went to Texas. I went to Oklahoma. When I came back to my mountains, I was home. I live in Anderson County now, but I can cross the line into Roane County and I’m home. We have a homecoming every year. Many tears are shed at George Jones Memorial Baptist Church. My age group doesn’t come because they are hurt. They are angry, but they don’t understand that we must still have a part of what was our forefathers. So we gather there and we have a good time. We have services and then eat, talk and [inaudible]. One person said to me this year, “I’d hate to start rolling down that hill like we use to do many years ago.” I said, I’d also hate to try to [inaudible] myself down in the George Jones’ Baptist Church, and go to sleep, as I did when we had three week revivals in Wheat. Everybody loved everybody else. My grandmother use to say, “Don’t say anything bad about anybody. You’re kin to all of them.” But my aunt found Joe Moneymaker and he wasn’t kin to us, so she married him. But anyway, we were just a big family. When somebody would be sick, everybody went. Everybody took care of the crops around in our area. When it was scattered, we were so ill at ease, scared because our community was isolated from big towns. We went to Harriman every six months. We went to Oliver Springs when we had to have a doctor. That wasn’t very often. Grandmother used things like kerosene and coal oil for healing our hurts. My brother went across a rock, a little ravine type of thing and he cut his head open all the way. Grandmother just washed it out real good with coal oil and put some carbolic salve on it and kept dressing it every day. He still got the scar, but he lived. We didn’t have tetanus shots. We grew great big gardens. Grandmother put up great big things in the smoke house. She had shelves in there to put all kinds of vegetables and fruits. Granddaddy had many apple trees, peach trees, we had peach orchards. We had mulberry trees, which if you crawled up in them, you got the mulberries on you and you got a whipping with a peach tree or hickory switch from that. You know, it was a beautiful place. I never had to worry about if I wanted to scream and holler and run, and ride horseback. I could do it in my home place. Well, when we went to the Cartive area, that was city, and we could no longer do that because all the cars were going lickity split. I couldn’t remember being very comfortable. We would get out and lay down in the front yard which was a rolling hill and we would watch the lightning bugs. Granddaddy told us about the man in the moon and we’d find the big dipper and so forth. Everybody loved the Lord and they went by the way He told them. I guess that the strength of the Lord took us through. My great-grandmother Sellers died in 1945, which was two years after she had to leave her home place. She said, “I might as well go home to the Lord because I don’t have a home here. I no longer have a home.” You see, my uncle was a fire department man, and he tried to get us passes to go home, but they were burying some stuff at our home area, so they wouldn’t let us in. I’ve never been back home.
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MS. MCCALL-ELY: A man told me, a government man told me the other day that he would get a pass and take me pretty close to home. I’m looking forward to that. I will really like to look and see if I can find my cedar tree at the grainery, my cedar tree at the garage, my big maple tree in my front yard. It was hard. It still hurts. I’m no longer angry with the government. My brother served in the Army, the Navy for 28 years, served in the post office for 15 years. I’m a nurse because when I was little, I had a lot of sickness and I loved my Dr. Hicker, and he said you’re going to be my little nurse one day. So I’m a nurse. I think we did pretty well. We got lawyers, doctors, scientists, firemen, policemen. Marvin Stonecipher just passed away. He was sort of my uncle since he married an aunt of mine. He was in security. You know they had to use the men that knew the property around here because those Yankees would get lost in our hills and couldn’t find their way back to where they belonged. So they used Marvin Stonecipher, Joe Moneymaker, Red Moneymaker, some of them that climbed those hills many times. They used them to find the way back home because the Yankees just didn’t know how to get here. That was the bad thing about it. We found all these people coming from the North, and you know I’m southern, so it was a little bit hard to say, “Now they sell our land for thousands of dollars but we got $39 an acre.” I don’t even remember. It was like in the ‘50’s when my granddaddy got the money for it. I do not resent the government mostly because we needed to be spread out to tell others what we learned by being in the Wheat Community. We love home. We’re gradually retiring and come all the way from overseas, California, Washington. All of us are sort of finding a place in Kingston, in Oak Ridge, in Knoxville, in Harriman. We’re coming home because there is a lot of us. I’m 66 and there’s a lot of my age group that were at the Sunday Homecoming, October 5. We were so happy to be there. Fifty years will be 2000. I graduated in 1950 and we’re going to make our George Jones Church hill have our colors of gold and blue. We hope to have a big day that day because we don’t know how long… The government’s been very good about mowing our cemeteries, keeping our church up. They help us with our church so that we can have a homecoming. Many people think of our church as the haunted church. It is not haunted to me, but they do damage our church and vandalize our church. I’m so thankful that New Bethel can be here because that gives me something. Dyllis gives me something. So, you know, things happen to people, but it says you don’t stray far from where you began, and that’s me. I’m an Ely now, but I belong to Guy McCall who lived there. His daddy had a peach orchard in the area. My mother, of course, it was her that had the 200 year old home. She worked at Y-12 when it first opened. She was one of the first ones to work in there, Winnie Sellers-McCall. She didn’t have protective clothing when she worked as a statistician there, like they do nowadays. But it’s ok. I lost her in 1984. They said they didn’t know what kind of damage had been done, but apparently something had been done because they had to do a lot of things to get into her bloodstream to take care of her. People do not realize when they made the bell, to thank and be peaceful with Japan, it was difficult to look at it, and when it gongs each night, I think about K.B. Johnson, who was at Pearl Harbor. His brother was on shore and knew his big brother was dying. It did a lot to C.T. Johnson, but we lived through it. We thank the government for what they do now. We’re very pleased with ORNL [Oak Ridge National Laboratory] because they want us to tell our story. We thank them so very much.
INTERVIEWER: Obviously you had a lot of friends, you were a young girl, you had a lot of friends…
MS. MCCALL-ELY: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Did a lot of those friends disperse to other places, or did you pretty much stay in touch?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We did not stay in touch because it was difficult to write a letter without crying. We sort of decided, “We’ll just forget about that.” We have some pictures of my class, I was in the fifth grade when we left. My brother was in the seventh grade, and we have some pictures and we do, as I said, try to get the people that graduate even beyond the time. A lot of them were in Harriman, Wartburg, Coalfield, Knoxville, but I guess I was the furthest away in Texas. However, the Lee Arnold family went to Washington state. Ms. Eula taught up there for many years. Ms. Effie Thacker was in the Kingston area. She’s gone. But a lot of people settled in Kingston, or Harriman and Dyllis area, Sugar Grove Valley. There was many of them. The Stoneciphers some of them settled there. But it was like when we come back, we always start looking for so-and-so. Of course, we’re all married, so it’s a little bit hard to find the girls. But this year I had 10 of my classmates that were at homecoming. That’s the time, that’s when it’s so great because that’s the time. We know it happens the first Sunday of October and everybody comes and says, “I’m Barbara McCall-Ely. Who are you?” I found Frances May; Prisilla May; Ernest Weaver; the Jones twins- Myrtle and Mary; Allen Murray; the Qualls- John, Sue, Pauline, Patty; the Magill twins. It’s almost like there was no time between. We don’t talk about when we had to leave. We talk about how happy we are to be back. It’s like Edwin Arnold said at our banquet this year, “It’s just like old home week.” We used to gather at churches, pray, sing, take our troubles and talk to each other. When we would have Roane County fairs, everybody would come from a long ways in the wagons and with the horses. We didn’t have money to run the cars. My granddaddy had a car in the garage all of my little life, but he didn’t have money to run it. He barely made… If we didn’t have our gardens and our peach orchard, and the things, the hogs and the chickens, we would not have survived the Depression. But we did have that and we thanked God that after we left there, WPA [Works Progress Administration] helped my uncle get a job before we left and then when we left he was a fireman. I think it’s so funny, in 1943, of April, they had to leave you-know-what. When the government left in 1961, my uncle and aunt had to move back in, not too far away from where we were. So they moved us out and then they made my uncle and aunt move back in. My aunt was real angry. She said she just couldn’t hardly abide that. But anyway, we are happy. We still remember our forefathers. We have many, many pictures. We have histories. My aunt’s book of We Call it Wheat has been so publicized and great-great-grandchildren ask her to please have it published again. So she did, 300 copies. We’ve got about 150 left. But she tells about all of our cemeteries, all the ones that graduated, all the families that were in the Wheat area, and it’s something they can hold onto because, you see, we don’t have houses to hold onto. We don’t have land to hold onto. So we have to hold onto pictures and books. City Behind the Fence didn’t make us very happy because we didn’t want the fence. I can remember when the gates slammed behind us after they searched us. My brother and I look back and say goodbye. There will never be another home. So that was home. It’s still home. I can’t see it, but I know my mountains are here and they protect me from harm.
INTERVIEWER: Do you still go back to the cemeteries a lot?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We go to the cemeteries. I have relatives in the Common Presbyterian Cemetery. All we have left of our Common Presbyterian Church, is a cemetery and a monument that is up close to where you turn off to where you go to Lenoir City. That has part of the wall that was taken from our Common Presbyterian Church. It has been placed in front of the monument and the government makes it easy for us to see. So when people come, they say, “There’s the Common Presbyterian Church.” My great-grandfather, Sam Stubbs, gave that property, and then my granddaddy, great-granddaddy Sellers gave the property and was one of the deacons in the Baptist church. You see, we didn’t have a lot of… Baptists, Common Presbyterian, Methodists all worshipped together. We didn’t know we were different. We just all loved each other. One Sunday we would have a Baptist preacher, and the next Sunday we would have a Common Presbyterian, and then the next Sunday we would have a Methodist. My aunt said the next Sunday we didn’t have anything but Sunday school, and they were very happy about that. But we have so often gone to cemeteries and so many times the tombstones have been knocked over by vandals. Each year, Don Watson, some of the men, go and straighten up and replace tombstones. We have also had them cleaned off because they’ve been in bad array. But we go to our cemeteries, and to a certain extent, we say thank you for our heritage. Crawford Cumberland Presbyterian is taken care of and mowed by the government. Now the Scott Cabbage is not mowed. It’s suppose to be the City of Oak Ridge’s business, and it’s not mowed. They can’t hardly find their tombstones. But that’s too bad. But the George Jones Cemetery and the Cumberland Presbyterian, our Dyllis cemetery are very well kept. Dyllis keeps their’s pretty much, but we do visit and that’s a part of going home because you know it was very hard when my Grandma Sellers died in 1945. They weren’t going to let us bring her back to lay her with Grandpa. But someone was kind enough and my uncle being a fireman, and my Marvin Stonecipher being security, we got in and put Grandma there. Now there are many of the younger people, the Williams are buried there. So we didn’t get to put the death date of my Grandma Sellers, (and then my Grandpa Stubbs who died in ’41) on the tombstones until just a few years ago. My aunt and I had Mr. Summers to go over there from Oliver Springs, go over there and put their death dates, because you did well to bury them. You couldn’t do anything else. So we do visit there and some people like the Embries still see their area. I can see where the Moneymaker’s trail went to. I can see where the road to that is. I can see where Mr. Walker McKinney’s road goes, but I can’t go in it. You know, gates bar things. So maybe one of these days before I die, I’ll be able to see the twin springs on Mr. Walker McKinney’s place, and maybe I’ll be able to see the Moneymaker area. But until they put the gates down, then we have to wait and bide our time, but it’s getting better.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds as though there were a lot of different crops planted here, they just didn’t plant corn or wheat.
MS. MCCALL-ELY: No.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds like there were a lot of different crops.
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We had tobacco. We had wheat crops. Mr. Jack Rather, he had a big ole combine, and when they’d come, all the people would come and harvest it according to families. Then that family’s wife had to get the dinner ready. I can remember Grandmother fixing big dinners for the harvest hands. I always liked to get in the way and the threshing’s would get all over me and Granddaddy would scream, “You’re going to get in the way.” But you know, Mr. Jack Rather would always say, “Oh, come on up here, Barbara. You can ride with me.” He would take me up and let me ride around with the threshing of the wheat. We had also in the corn fields, we had what we called corn field peas, and we would harvest those. That was down where the bottom was, which was sort of, well, people might call it a river now, but it was a pond to us. But I used to go and my brother and I were left home some, (because Granddaddy carried the mail and Grandmother went to do the nursing for Dr. Hacker, because he couldn’t always get around) my brother and I were left one time and a storm, ice storm come up. Our old Blue, our old cow, got her tail stuck in the pond and it was freezing around it. So we had to cut off part of her tail to get her home. But that was all right. We made it and we brought her home and we doctored her up real good. Granddaddy said, “You did a good job.” But lots of times, you know, we didn’t have to worry about people bothering us because nobody would bother us then. Also, we had, when we put tobacco out, all of us worked at it. You see, we did things as a family, Granddaddy, Dot Moneymaker, Joe, my brother and I, and my grandmother. All of us put out tobacco slips. We put those out and it was real aggravating, because you had to be just right at putting it in a certain hole. Granddaddy would then come and not stamp it too hard. Granddaddy had his crops according to the Almanac, and he use to know exactly what he was suppose to plant, the potatoes, and the corn, and the peas. So he really did a good job of raising things. As I said, the apple and peach orchards, we had all kinds of apples- winesaps, yellow apples. All kinds.
INTERVIEWER: So you didn’t have to go to the stores that much.
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We didn’t go to the store. We went to Mr. Chester Watson’s store for like kerosene, and, oh, you got a Coke. Granddaddy used to have, he used a dump truck and would carry grain, I mean sand and stuff, and gravel, for pavement on roads. We’d go and get some cheese and a cracker from a cracker barrel. We’d get in there and eat that cheese and cracker. So, we went to Chester Watson’s store, but as I said, we didn’t go to Harriman, or Oliver Springs but once or twice a year. Now if you got a tooth ache… I can remember when Granddaddy fell out of the barn and hurt himself. He stuck a tobacco stub in his groin area and my uncle sawed off part of it. He said, “Leave it there because he’ll bleed to death before we get him to Harriman.” So we left the stub in there. But Granddaddy had fallen and I know we were very afraid that Granddaddy wouldn’t make it down that long ways to Harriman. It was a long ways when you were sick.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go by car?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We went by car many times, of course, it was the way we went to Sunday school and things. John Watson got a bus, and that was a school bus as well as a church bus. If one person, Mr. Watson always had a car, and he would take us places. Of course, you know when you were at school, you walked to school and that was three miles from my home place. So you did it through snow. I was a short legged things, so everybody had to bother, “Where’s Barbara?” They would come back and pick me up out of snow. Of course, I got carried around by the Cooper boys and stuff like that when you got in the snow when you were little. But anyway, everybody looked after everybody else. So we didn’t have a lot of conveniences, as I said. My granddaddy had a car. It was there. When I was real tiny, apparently I rode up in the back close to the glass because it was just a two seater, and they put my brother and I back there, so, we could see out there. We’d tell Granddaddy and we’d ask him, “Granddaddy, are we going to get up that hill?” Because sometimes it was muddy and we went to Rockwood to see Grandpa and Grandma Stubbs and it was hard to get down there. It took us all day to get down there. We’d spend the night and come back the next day. But that was just in Rockwood, or Cartive area. Sometimes my uncle who worked on the Norris Dam, he came home every weekend. He and my Aunt Dorothy came home, and they would take us places like to the movies. Of course, the ones that dated, when they dated, they usually had some little kids that were in the backseat and if they smooched or something, we’d snicker. But anyway, they took us to shows down in Harriman. We went to football games. Yeah. We went to those. We didn’t particularly like Oliver Springs, but anyway, we were sort of enemies with them. But anyway, we’d go to football games. Basketball games we always went to. We had barn dances. Now if you haven’t been to a barn dance… Now I learned to square dance when I was real tiny, but anyway, my brother and I did good square dancing. We were Christians, but we still did our square dances. Granddaddy would open the barn. He had about the biggest barn around and he’d open the barn and we’d have a barn square dance. Then we would go out and we’d eat. Oh, of course, you know when molasses-making time, now that was a good time to have square dancing. We had our own cane and Granddaddy had a place there where the horses went around, and around, and around, and crushed the cane, and then it made juice. Then you went down to the little branch that went through our property and you had vats there. So you put that juice in there and you’d make your molasses. Grandmother and Granddaddy would make our lard from the hog stuff. They’d also use those branches for skinning hogs. Then of course, the smoke house… Now you had to keep the smoke going there and we had smoke house. Part of it was Grandmother’s canning area, but part of it was for smoking hams and bacon. You know, my granddaddy, it came in handy because Dr. Hacker couldn’t buy a ham at the store. It was too high. So he would take a ham when he came and saw my brother and I when we were sick. My brother had asthma real bad. So he got sick real often and I had rheumatic fever. I remember Mr. Littleton dying with typhoid fever. But we had a Dr. Fly, and believe me he could bite you with a shot, but everybody got the typhoid shot after Mr. Littleton died. You know, we learned by experience. We were taught by experience. I’m so sorry for children today that are confined to a little tiny sidewalk because I had many places. I remember killing an opossum one time. I thought, my brother and I knocked it in the head with a hammer. Of course, we did that with little pigs too and Granddaddy said, “That’s not what I want to slaughter.” But anyway, we got about three of his little pigs before he got to us. But anyway, we used a hammer on that old opossum. We went home to tell Granddaddy we got an opossum, and he better have Grandmother bake it. Well, when we got back, he said, “I don’t think you killed it.” “Yes, we did.” Well, the opossum wasn’t there when we took Granddaddy back. But anyway, you know, I talk about my granddaddy and grandmother. My mother and daddy were divorced before I was born. Mother went to Knoxville, and my daddy was in North Carolina. But my grandmother and granddaddy and my uncle, Joe and Dot Moneymaker, were the ones that raised me. My great-grandmother, at 81, taught me how to skip a rope. Of course, she broke her wrist while she was doing it, but she taught me how to do it. So anyway, nevertheless, we just had a very close knit family. Nobody, but nobody neglected any child. I was just, I could go eat at Ms. Marjorie Lee’s then. She’s Barger now. Ms. Frank [inaudible], I could go eat at her house. Wherever we were. I grew up with Gene Lee and Barbara, J.W. My brother’s name was Gene and my name is Barbara, and Grandmother would come out and say, “Barbara and Gene,” and four of us would come. Ms. Marjorie would go out and would yell, “Barbara and Gene,” and four of us would come. You know, we went in the woods where you would go and lift up stuff off of fallen trees and you’d find bugs there, and worms there. You know, we learned all about those. But you know, I had a free childhood, until the age of 11. It was never burdened. Grandmother gave us a little whipping before we went out. She gave us one at lunch. She gave us one at night time, and in between, if she caught us doing something, she gave us another little switching. But you know we were always outside doing something. Horses, animals, little kitties, little chickens. We would watch and we were very careful that we didn’t step in the place where Grandmother boiled the sheets and stuff in real hot water in a great big old black kettle. If you stepped in that, believe me you didn’t stay there very long, because it was hot for a long time. But Grandmother thought that she had to bleach everything out and then you ironed everything too. I learned to iron washcloths, believe it or not. But my grandmother gave me one of those irons that you have to set on the stove. You better be careful because you can get burned that way too. But anyway, I’d iron the washcloths and the towels. Then I finally graduated. At the time, my uncle was a fireman for Oak Ridge. I was ironing his white shirts and I’d get 10 cents a shirt, and that was great money for us. Many times Granddaddy would give us one little pig and that was our little pig and we could keep that. Then when Granddaddy slaughtered it or sold it, or whatever, we got the money from it. I can remember Granddaddy sugar curing ham. I can remember Grandmother and him fixing sausage, just enough sage to make it good, and then Grandmother would bake some of it and then put it in a jar and keep it for a long time. They would fix bacon just right. There’s nothing like red-eye gravy. Red-eye gravy is great and it doesn’t take much, you know, to make some red-eye gravy. Just a little bit of water and some of that ham… juice, is what we called it. We liked cornbread. I didn’t know there was white bread until I went to Cartive. Grandmother always baked our bread on Saturdays. Bread and pies and cakes were baked on Saturday. I didn’t know you had to buy white bread until I was 13-years-old. That experience teaches me that I can do anything if I set my mind to it. If the Lord’s with me, and he’s been with me so many years, and without that, without our Christian heritage and our teaching… Our teachers, Martha Matts, Effie, well, she was Driscoll, Thacker, Ada Driscoll Murray, Ms. Della McKinney, those women loved us children, and intended for us to learn to read, write, and arithmetic. Oh, Catherine…
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MS. MCCALL-ELY: …was rough on arithmetic. My little knuckles stayed red all the time because I wasn’t very much on arithmetic. I didn’t like fractions and Ms. Catherine Gallaher would hit my knuckles with a ruler and say, “You got to learn those. Your momma was good at arithmetic and your brother was good, now you got to be good.” But I wasn’t very good at arithmetic, but that was okay. Ms. Ina Phillips Alcorn, also, was one of my teachers. We were very upset. She married a foreigner. She married a man from Oliver Springs, and we didn’t really like that. But anyway, she left on Christmas holiday as Ms. Ina Phillips, one of my kinfolks. It was some of my granddaddy’s kinfolks. She came back Mrs. Cheekwood. We didn’t even like the name, and you can imagine what we called her. But anyway, Ms. Ina Phillips was a great person. She was the last one to teach me at home. I was real upset because I didn’t get to go to Ms. Eula Arnold. She was in the seventh grade, and of course, Mr. Walker McKinney was up there in high school, and I didn’t get them to teach me. I was really looking forward to my kinfolks teaching me, but I didn’t get Ms. Eula. My brother almost did. He was in the seventh and Ms. Eula was teaching the eighth, but he didn’t manage it. Of course, we didn’t get to Mr. Walker, for him to teach us history. But he was a history buff. I loved my young life. I loved my Wheat, Roane County. I still love it. You can take the person out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the person. You don’t take where you were born, and in 14 years, you don’t take it away. I enjoy coming and talking about how beautiful my home place was. It wasn’t little shacks, folks. Dexter Christianberry said, “The shacks,” when he spoke. We didn’t invite him back to speak at George Jones Memorial Baptist Church because we have pictures of our homes. They weren’t shacks. Yes, we had shacks, but our homes, our big homes were good. They just shoved them off the hillside with a bulldozer, and they wouldn’t let us have the sign that said “Edgewood.” They just shoved it off right after we left. Thank goodness. Some people had to watch the bulldozers shove it off. We didn’t. I thank God that I didn’t have to watch that.
INTERVIEWER: Are you finished?
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INTERVIEWER: Velma Blank, you grew up on a farm [inaudible]?
MS. BLANK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: You grew up on a farm in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s, ‘40’s maybe? Tell us about life…
MS. BLANK: I was born 1916.
INTERVIEWER: 1916. Tell us what farm life was like back in those days.
MS. BLANK: We just farmed. We didn’t have tractors and things like we do now. We had teams of mules and stuff like that to… and we went out with a hoe to clean the weeds out of our gardens and corn fields, and places. We mowed our hay with a mowing machine and raked it with the mules, and everything. We just had a good farm living. We grew a lot of what we ate, and everything, you know. But we’d save, we’d have a wheat crop and stuff like that and we’d sell stuff to buy the staples we’d need for the year, you know. But just to get up early on a morning, and when we were in school, we’d have to go out and milk about two cows before we went to school, carry up water for Momma. We just worked from daylight maybe until the sun went down on the farm when we were out of school. We all went to school and most of us graduated from high school. So we just, there were 10 in my family and then we just had a good farm living. And for fun, why, we played in the yard, played ball, played horseshoes, I don’t know what all we done, marbles. We just had to entertain one another because we didn’t have all the places to go. Of course our church life came first. [Inaudible] would see that we all got to church. We just lived like that. It was one of the happier times of my life because… we weren’t afraid to go nowhere because people didn’t bother children then like they do now. Now, where we live, we have to stay in the house with our doors locked, suspecting someone to come in, you know. It wasn’t nothing like that when we lived in the country up here. We just had all our friends, we had a good life.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of crops did you grow on your farm?
MS. BLANK: Corn, hay, sorghum molasses cane to make molasses. We had pea patches where we picked peas, just a lot of stuff like that, sweet potatoes and [inaudible] potatoes, and we had an apple orchard with about 60 trees in it. We’d put, we had a cellar down under our barn and we put the apples down there. We could go down there at Christmas time and open a barrel of those apples, you know, for Christmas. We’d put walnuts and popcorn and everything down there. We just, we’d get our friends and we’d have all that to munch on when they came. Our house was the stopping place for the young people then, because there were so many of us. By the time all of us drug in a friend, we had a house full.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have hired hands at your house, or just the family?
MS. BLANK: No, we done it ourselves. We didn’t have any hired help.
INTERVIEWER: Had your farm been over several generations?
MS. BLANK: Well, my father inherited it from his father. He had four sisters and he was the only boy, so the home place went to him. So, but when we lived there, they just gave us about 10 days to get out of there. We had to sell our animals and we had cats and dogs, teams of mules. We had about three teams of mules, calves and things like that we had to get rid of, and find a place to live. We didn’t find a place to live until we got to Rockwood. We rented a place and about six months after that we found a house we could buy, and we bought that. We’ve lived there ever since.
INTERVIEWER: How did your father tell you, you were going to move? What did he say to you? Did he bring the family together?
MS. BLANK: Well, really I was working in Rockwood when he, when they come and told him. I don’t know what he said and everything, but I guess they told him to do the best he could about getting out, I guess. That’s about the way it was.
INTERVIEWER: Was he bitter in any way?
MS. BLANK: No. No, he just knew there was nothing he could do about it.
INTERVIEWER: Did anybody tell him why he was being moved?
MS. BLANK: Well, we didn’t know it until the day that they were really going to take the land, the day they told him to move, but prior to that there was a big creek that ran through our farm and there were all these people down there taking samples of that creek. It’s White Oak Creek. It runs through that and they wouldn’t say nothing when Daddy would be down there talking to them. But anyhow, we heard later that they found uranium in that creek. It’s just down about a mile from here, our farm was, right over this way. So, that’s all we knew. They didn’t say nothing while they were surveying down there or nothing.
INTERVIEWER: What were you doing at the time? You said you were working in Rockwood.
MS. BLANK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Were there a lot of people who were living here and working in other areas at the time?
MS. BLANK: I just got through graduating from high school, when I [inaudible] work. We felt like something was going to happen, you know, with the farm work. There wasn’t anything around here. In fact, there wasn’t anything for the young people to do. They might could do house work for people, or pick berries or something like that for people, but that’s all you could do. I went out to where I could find something else.
INTERVIEWER: You say the church was a focal point in your lives.
MS. BLANK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Other than Sunday worship service, what other activities took place in the church?
MS. BLANK: Well, I was the secretary for the Sunday school for two or three years. My mother taught, you know, they use to have a little card class if we would get any little children. My mother taught that class for a many number of years. We just, we had a good church life. Daddy didn’t go to church that often, but he insisted that we go. But after we moved to Rockwood, why he got in line with the church and everything and he was elected deacon to his church. He lived a good life. The trouble about him, he drank some and he just never did get that interested in church up here.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the move had something to do with that, taking him from his roots?
MS. BLANK: Yeah, because his people that he ran around with up here, you know, he didn’t have them with him. But I don’t think it was because of anybody taking a drink. It’s up to them. It’s their choice.
INTERVIEWER: Was there a lot of drinking in this area at the time?
MS. BLANK: We had hillbilly stills around here, and his friends and him had all the stills.
INTERVIEWER: This was going on during the prohibition and all that.
MS. BLANK: Yeah. He never did own none himself, but some of his friends did, you know.
INTERVIEWER: So if somebody wanted some, they knew…
MS. BLANK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: …how to get it. Did a lot of newcomers come into the area here? Were there new residents who moved down here?
MS. BLANK: Not too many from other places, but most of them were neighbors and everybody knew everybody, I reckon.
INTERVIEWER: A lot of people moved down into this area from being displaced at Norris Dam.
MS. BLANK: Yeah, but…
INTERVIEWER: Did you know any of them?
MS. BLANK: Oh, yeah. I knew them. They lived up in the upper end of here.
INTERVIEWER: How did they react to being told they had to move again?
MS. BLANK: They were good people, and they had their church over in their community. They were really good people. Some of their young people used to come over to our house on Saturday night and sit with us and play games and things. We knew them real well. The Prices and the Proffitts, four or five of the families, Ray Fields.
INTERVIEWER: Were they big families? Most the families big families around here?
MS. BLANK: Well, some of them didn’t have very many children. There were 10 in my family and I believe there were six in Mr. Cole’s family. Most of them had more than one.
INTERVIEWER: They always like to have boys to work on the farm.
MS. BLANK: Yeah. There were six boys and four girls in my family. Then Daddy, he raised two of his half-brothers. They lived with us.
INTERVIEWER: As a child, did you play games in the barn.
MS. BLANK: Yeah, we used to.
INTERVIEWER: What were some of the games you played in the barn?
MS. BLANK: Hide and seek, things like that. We had a big log barn, but I think Daddy built a new one before they took the land up. It wasn’t a log barn, but he built a log barn. We had two barns then. But because I had been down in Rockwood working before he built the other barn.
INTERVIEWER: Most of these farmers, that was their job. They were farmers. They didn’t have any other job?
MS. BLANK: Daddy had done logging for Mr. Grubb and he had his lumbering. He raised lumber for, at the other side of the Solway Bridge, there was a lumber yard on the left over there, and he raised lumber for him for a long time.
INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you, you grew up on a farm, and obviously a lot of times these days we have droughts. Did you all do anything special when there was a drought and the area was dry, as far as trying to protect your crops.
MS. BLANK: Well, ours was on that White Oak Creek. We didn’t have very many times that we had a drought. Daddy rented land on the Clinch River too, and we didn’t have very much trouble with that. We just…
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t have any irrigation system or anything like that.
MS. BLANK: No.
INTERVIEWER: How about your mother, she cared for 10 children. What was that like? Tell us about your mother.
MS. BLANK: Well, we all had our jobs to do. They gave us all a job to do and we done that job. We knew what was coming if we didn’t do them. That way, why, she didn’t have all that much to do. But I wonder sometimes how she got us all out to school every morning, to church. I just had one and I could hardly get him out.
INTERVIEWER: What age were you expected to start doing chores?
MS. BLANK: As quick as they were old enough to do something.
INTERVIEWER: Five or six maybe.
MS. BLANK: Yeah. I guess so. We usually did what they said for us to do because if we didn’t, why, there was a switch out there on the tree.
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever have problems around here with flooding, or tornadoes, that you can remember.
MS. BLANK: That creek was about 100 yards from our front porch, but I’ve seen it up half way to the porch. Used to when the school bus ran, and had come a storm, and that creek would get up, why, Daddy would get, we had a big red horse that we rode all the time. He’d get that horse and ford us across that creek, when it would storm and the school bus ran.
INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else that you would like to talk about that I haven’t asked?
MS. BLANK: I don’t know of anything. I just know that we had a good life on what time we lived up here.
INTERVIEWER: Do you miss…
MS. BLANK: I was 24 when I went to Rockwood to work.
INTERVIEWER: Do you miss living here after all these years?
MS. BLANK: Well, I like to come back home every once in a while, but I think we were better off when we got out of here, because we could have a better living and have more.
INTERVIEWER: Do you ever get a chance to go back to where you lived?
MS. BLANK: Yeah. I go back to this church over here, the Bethel Church, every year in May for homecoming. My mother and daddy are buried over in that cemetery.
INTERVIEWER: So you still get to go to their graves and [inaudible].
MS. BLANK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Do you sometimes wish all these facilities would just go away and you could live like you did 60 years ago?
MS. BLANK: No. I think people need to have progress, don’t you think?
INTERVIEWER: So you weren’t bitter about the move?
MS. BLANK: No. Still, we didn’t get the price for our land we needed to get. I’m still not mad about it because they didn’t pay as much for the land.
[Break in video]
INTERVIEWER: Dot Anderson Bussell, we get a lot of questions on a public tour that we have about the cemetery, the graves that have covers over them behind Bethel Valley Church. Now, be looking at the camera when you answer this. Tell me what that’s all about.
MS. BUSSELL: There was a Mrs. Sherwood that had a baby that died at birth, and it started raining just right after they got the child in the grave, and she was very upset. So she had her family members to go to the cemetery and make the cover for the grave. That’s how it was started. Like that.
INTERVIEWER: So all of those graves are actually infants.
MS. BUSSELL: Right. They’re all infants.
INTERVIEWER: Now when we take the bus by the church every day, we always point out the stone marker that says, “In Memoriam of Bethel Valley Church.” How did that stone marker get erected there?
MS. BUSSELL: Ok, on our last meeting, the church was suppose to be torn down. So we had the stone erected so many feet behind the church, which it states on the stone, that it would be torn down, we thought it would be torn down. That’s the reason why they took the money that was in the treasurey and erected the stone.
INTERVIEWER: How quickly did it take to get that stone erected? Obviously, you didn’t have much time.
MS. BUSSELL: No, we had very little time. In fact, our families were two of the first ones, our grandparents and my mother and dad were the first ones that moved out because our home. We only had about 30 days to move out, less than 30 days to move out, due to the fact that my grandparents’ home was made into the Personnel Office, right here at the corner of first and Bethel Valley. I was born across the street from that. Our house became the Fire Department and my grandparents’ house was the Personnel Office.
INTERVIEWER: How big a house did you have?
MS. BUSSELL: My grandparents had a very large house, which I have a picture of it, that’s on file here, and our house was a four, five room house. My grandparents’ was about eight and it had a porch all the way around. In fact, my great-grandparents are the ones that lived in the house before I was born and they are all buried at the Bethel Cemetery.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have electricity at your house?
MS. BUSSELL: No, and an outhouse, too. So, it was a simple life. I went to a one-room school and I can recall going down, and everybody drank out of the same dipper, going down and getting the water from the spring and bringing it back up. In the first grade, I developed rheumatic fever, and I did not get to finish the first grade here in Oak Ridge, which was Wheat, Tennessee.
INTERVIEWER: So, you didn’t have a telephone either.
MS. BUSSELL: No, and that brings up another subject. They would come and thresh the wheat. So we never knew when they were coming, but we always tried to, you know, get things ready for them, because we had no phone and they would just show up. We would hear when they were in the neighborhood, or something. So we had to provide three meals a day for all the people that came with the machinery to run it. That also meant that we cleaned out our straw beds and we had clean straw in our straw beds for another year.
INTERVIEWER: When you were home at night reading, how did you have light in the house? You had no electricity, so…
MS. BUSSELL: We had a kerosene light. Now when our power is off, I have lit a kerosene lamp, and I realize you can’t see very well. So most of, we had games and stuff like that, but usually we were tired after being out all day. We did not, we had chores to do. We did not come home, when we came home, we had corn to hoe out, to, you know, space it out. We had potatoes to dig and we had things like that. When we came home, we just didn’t have nothing to do. So, you were ready to go to bed when it came night time.
INTERVIEWER: So when the sun went down, it was time…
MS. BUSSELL: …to hit the hay.
INTERVIEWER: Nobody was staying up until 11 o’clock.
MS. BUSSELL: No, not to watch the news. (laughter)
INTERVIEWER: How many people were in your family?
MS. BUSSELL: I had one brother and two sisters, and my mother and father. My brother died 13 years ago, and he was the oldest. So, there was only four of us, but we had, I guess some of the other members, (I’m the oldest member of the committee,) and some of the others said we had more luxury, but I guess we did and I didn’t realize it. We didn’t act it either because we had cars before anybody else did.
INTERVIEWER: But no asphalt roads?
MS. BUSSELL: No, and my grandfather Anderson was road commissioner and I know some of the roads that still exist over here that go toward Bear Creek from Bethel Valley, he laid off that road. They asked him one day if he was drunk, which he did not drink, but they asked him if he was drunk when he laid off that road.
INTERVIEWER: You went to Knoxville when you were young?
MS. BUSSELL: We moved just off Hardin Valley, on Coward Mill Road, which I still own the farm house.
INTERVIEWER: When you left here?
MS. BUSSELL: Yes, and we were the first ones that left and we moved out real soon. I mean real, real soon, because they were wanting our houses for these particular things. So they asked us to move very fast. So we sold most of the cattle and we moved to a much smaller farm, and we did not get paid until about four months later.
INTERVIEWER: What I was getting at, when you were younger, and still living here, I’m assuming with a vehicle, you did go to Knoxville…?
MS. BUSSELL: No. No, my mother did, but I did not.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea how long that took, the drive from here to Knoxville?
MS. BUSSELL: Well, my grandfather was the one that was looking for us another place to live, and I can recall that he would be gone for a couple of days looking, because land was scarce around here, and we wanted to stay. He would stay with his niece that lived between Knoxville and here. But my mother often talked about going into Knoxville. Her father had the Davis Grocery Store that was at the corner of Bear Creek Valley Road, right there at the entrance to Bear Creek Valley. She talked about that they would go up into Knoxville to pick up merchandise for the store.
INTERVIEWER: So they were gone for the whole day.
MS. BUSSELL: Yes. So, they had to get up early and do their chores and milk the cows and things like that. I know how to milk a cow.
INTERVIEWER: What time did you get up in the morning?
MS. BUSSELL: Usually around six or so because I was smaller, but my brother and sister got up earlier than I did.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you had to move?
MS. BUSSELL: Had to move, I was born in 1935 and had to move in ’43.
INTERVIEWER: So you were about 8-years-old.
MS. BUSSELL: Yes.
[End of Interview]

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BETHEL VALLEY INTERVIEWS:
MAUDE LANE, S.E. COLEY, DOROTHY MONEYMAKER, BARBARA MCCALL-ELY,
VELMA BLANK, AND DOT ANDERSON BUSSELL
1998
Interviewer Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
INTERVIEWER: What was your favorite thing to do as a kid?
INTERVIEWEE 1: What was my favorite thing as a kid?
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your childhood around here. What did you do as the child of a farmer?
INTERVIEWEE 1: Well we made our own wagons and we rode over the hills and climbed trees and swung out of them and fell. I could hold my own with any of those boys. I could shoot a gun as good as they could. They didn’t bother me. We’ll put it that way. We played in the creek all the time. My oldest brother threw me in the creek one time and told me to sink or swim. I can remember sitting on the bottom of that creek. I sunk. (laughter) We just fought and scratched and stayed hidden from Mom so we didn’t have to do anything.
INTERVIEWER: Was it the watering hole?
INTERVIEWEE 1: No, it was White Oak Creek, down there. We played in it all the time, chased snakes and whatever.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t have to spend a lot of money to do this.
INTERVIEWEE 1: No we didn’t. We didn’t have any money; we didn’t know what money was. We had very little money.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t have to ride around in cars.
INTERVIEWEE 1: No we fell in the creek.
INTERVIEWER: What was courting like back in those days?
INTERVIEWEE 1: Well I don’t know. I wasn’t old enough. I was 12 I think, when we moved out. My mother didn’t allow me to look at a boy.
INTERVIEWER: What were some of the games the girls played?
INTERVIEWEE 1: We played the same games the boys did: kicked the old tin can, Annie over, hopscotch. I can’t think of anything else. We had the hoop and wheel. Shoot marbles. I used to be a good shot at marbles. Jump rope, hot pepper and all that. We went to a one-room school all eight grades. I can’t remember all my teachers. Eula Arnold was my first teacher: Autumn Ladd was my second teacher. I can’t remember the rest. There was one I didn’t like. I could tell you that name, but I don’t want to. I guess that is about it.
INTERVIEWER: What do you remember of when the government came in and told your folks they were taking the property?
INTERVIEWEE 1: Well, it was a scary time because we couldn’t find anywhere to move to. We were one of the last families that moved out. We had one old cow that we just turned her loose and we would go up and down this valley late in the afternoon and we’d find her. We rode the mules and would find her. We had one old mule if you fell off of her, you walked home because she stood still until you’d get up from under her feet and she left you. We moved out here when I was in the seventh grade. I went half a year at Wheat and then I went to Harriman. Finished my school at Harriman. Then I went some to Roane State but I didn’t graduate.
INTERVIEWER: Do you remember if you could take everything that you wanted to take with you?
INTERVIEWEE 1: No, they wouldn’t let my mother take any of her flowers and it broke her heart. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let her. They were just going to plow them up. They just wouldn’t let her. Other than that, we took what we wanted. As far as I know. I can’t remember much about it.
[Break in video]
MS. LANE: My best friend’s husband ran it.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about the rolling store.
MS. LANE: He came twice a week and we had to walk across this little hill right down here. We lived way down yonder at the gap of the ridge. My brothers had a little red wagon which was a treasure to us, because you didn’t get one of those very often. My mother or maybe one of the other children would come and haul our stuff back in the little red wagon. When the creek got up, we didn’t get there. She couldn’t get across it. I remember having to walk all that way to catch the school bus to go to high school too, in all types of weather, before we got the bus to come by the house. Our mailman didn’t come by the house either. We had to walk a mile and a half to the mailbox out on the other end, way down yonder. As Ms. Moneymaker’s people was our mailman and they rode a horse. It was a long time before they ever got a car that would come. We never did get the mail to come by our house, before we had to move out. We got the school bus, but the mailman didn’t come by. We still had to walk.
INTERVIEWER: So you did a lot of walking.
MS. LANE: We did. We had to walk a mile and a half to school and back in all kinds of weather. I can remember my brother over there, was born with asthma and the school teacher, one day, it was raining when it was time to go home. She took the curtain down off the windows in the school house and wrapped him up in it so he could walk home and not get wet. We’d a had to walk or stay there.
INTERVIEWER: What did you do when it snowed?
MS. LANE: We didn’t get there.
INTERVIEWER: But you had a school bus.
MS. LANE: Not if it was very deep then they didn’t, because the teacher couldn’t get there either, because she was way down in the country. All the cars just didn’t make it. She had a car, but not many people did at that time. We went to church in a horse and buggy. Finally, when Dad got a car, he gave us the little old buggy and we took everything off of it but the frame and the wheels. We had fun riding down the hills on it. I remember my dad’s youngest brother, he was just a little older than I was. There was a big hill that came down from our house and there was a bridge that went over a little branch. There was a big hole at one end of the bridge, but the wire fence came across to keep the cattle in. He was coming down through there. He was having himself a time. He went off the end of the bridge and hung himself on the barbed wire fence. He like to kill himself. He was a character anyhow.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you had a beau?
MS. LANE: 21.
INTERVIEWER: Were you still living at home?
MS. LANE: Yes. Me and my brother were there and my son was the last one. The last load that went out. We were the last family that moved out.
INTERVIEWER: What were your feelings when [inaudible].
MS. LANE: It was kind of sad because the two girls over there, we grew up together, adjoining farms with just a creek between our properties. We were going one way and they were going another and we never knew when we were going to see each other again. It’s kind of sad.
INTERVIEWER: Did you understand?
MS. LANE: Not really. I didn’t understand what was going on up there until my brother grew up big enough to work up there. And it was not long before we had to move. Of course, most of the young men out of there went into the Army. About a week after Pearl Harbor, about every eligible man volunteered and was gone.
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever ask any questions about why this happened?
MS. LANE: You didn’t get very many answers. We were just told that it was going to help the war efforts. My dad had gotten a job in Oakdale Car Shop, he called it then. The railroad over there. He worked there for years and years. He would leave sometimes like on a Monday morning and we wouldn’t see him until maybe the middle of the week, when all the troop trains were going through. He would have to stay and work them out. They had a little, what they called commissary over there where he worked. What little sleep he got, that’s where he did it. I may have been the oldest when I had to help Mother with the rest of them. We lived way out in the country and they went to a little one-room school. Of course, that’s where I went until I was old enough to go to the high school.
INTERVIEWER: Did you feel as though your family’s personality changed as a result of the move?
MS. LANE: It did. We didn’t even have electricity until we moved out of there. Our refrigeration was a spring, right down over there, that comes out from under the hill, is where we kept our stuff, or a cellar under the house. We could take our milk and butter that we didn’t want to spoil and Mother put it in crocks. I don’t know if you know what a crock is or not, but Mother would put it down in that and put a lid on top of it, set it down in the branch and nobody bothered it. Everybody’s was marked and everybody knew who’s they was and nobody bothered. That was one thing you didn’t do, was go around bothering other people’s property.
INTERVIEWER: Had your family been out here over many generations?
MS. LANE: My great-grandfather owned the farm. It was two farms and he divided it between my father and one of my uncles. My other grandfather’s farm joined this one. My great-grandfather I never saw, but my Grandfather Justice lived with us for a while.
INTERVIEWER: So a lot of farms were connected with the family connections.
MS. LANE: Yes. Way back, most of them. Some were inherited back many generations. Ours was 81 acres. All together, I don’t remember how much it all was before it was split.
INTERVIEWER: Was there a lot of cooperative growing back then?
MS. LANE: Right smart of it, yes. That little fat one over there I always had to take care of. He was a handful. I either had to go to the field with the two oldest boys or stay at the house with him and my sister, and Mother went.
INTERVIEWER: So you didn’t get to travel much.
MS. LANE: No, the closest town was Oliver Springs or Harriman and it was about equal distance to either one of them. There was no such thing as a movie theater. We made our own entertainment and we enjoyed it. Really did. We usually met at somebody’s house on the weekends and we would make molasses candy or popcorn balls. Some of the boys had guitars and mandolins and fiddles, and we would have music to dance or something like that.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of music did you dance to back then?
MS. LANE: Hillbilly. It was very hillbilly. Our entertainment was mostly when we had. Sometimes we had a three weeks revival. That was day and night because everybody went to it first thing in the morning, and then before 11 go to church, and then go back to work until five at night. Thank you.
[Break in video]
INTERVIEWER: S.E., how old were you when your family was told that, 1942-1943, to move out of here?
MR. COLEY: I was somewhere near 13. I was born in 1928 and we left here in ‘42. That would make me right at 14, I guess. Somewhere in that neighborhood.
INTERVIEWER: So you lived here how long?
MR. COLEY: I was born here, right down in that gap down there.
INTERVIEWER: What were some of the things that boys did around here other than doing farm chores?
MR. COLEY: There wasn’t very much except go to church, go to school and work. That is about all you did. I was telling Don, it’s a good thing in a way, I guess, to have started this project. We’d a sat here and we’d still be down there trying to make a living on those little poor acres. See it forced us all to leave here and go to different places, go to different schools, get different jobs, and what have you. Probably in a way, it might have been a good thing, but we didn’t think so at the time.
INTERVIEWER: Where did you move to?
MR. COLEY: We went to Harriman. Just across the river there in Harriman over there. See Dad left here before us and started work at Southern Railway.
[Break in video]
INTERVIEWER: You lived in the Wheat Community?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Yes. My people had lived in there for at least four generations before the government took it. The community of Wheat was named for the first postmaster of the community. His name was Henry Franklin Wheat. He was my first generation uncle. It was a little amusing that my grandfather was a mail carrier and he delivered mail back in Bethel Valley, Bear Creek Valley and all the others. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he went a certain route and the other three days of the week he went the other. Now he wouldn’t leave his mail bag on the horse and get off to go eat. There weren’t any restaurants, so he had to eat at somebody’s house. But the women would prepare the food and take it out to him and he’d sit on his horse and he’d eat his meal. Then his son, my father, Smith Sellers, was the mail carrier also, course he did it in a Model T Ford. And the amusing thing is that I have a nephew that was a mail carrier out in California. I think that’s a little amusing.
INTERVIEWER: How many people lived in the Wheat Community?
MS. MONEYMAKER: I have no idea, but it wasn’t a large community. The main part of the community was where the school and the churches were, but it spread out and included all the people around about there. Lord, I have no idea how many people there were. The Reverend George Jones, the church that still stands is named for him. When he died he gave to, I think it was 256 acres, I could be wrong about the number, in my book, I tell it but I don’t remember exactly, he gave that property and it was farm property, mostly for religion and education. The old Roane College was up on the hill from where that church building still stands. After the Civil War, the state of Tennessee did not have a Department of Education for quite some time. After they did get organized again, the College was donated to the state and it became Wheat High School at the corner of where the Turnpike and Blair Road come together. The land that Mister, Reverend Jones left had 22 houses on it, besides the church. Anyone that wanted to get an education, I had someone in the family to go, or that wanted to work in the school system or wanted to be a pastor, could live there free of charge in those houses. It’s amusing to think that the water was furnished them also, because they had to go to the spring to go get it. It was that way and it was still. In other words, when the government took the property, it didn’t belong to the people that lived in those houses. It was whatever legal process that had to go on.
INTERVIEWER: How big was the school?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Do you mean number-wise?
INTERVIEWER: Well, yeah, and the size of the building. Was it a one-room school house?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Oh no. It was a great big school house. They had added to it. When I was in high school, they added a back to it that was bigger than what was already there. It provided education for anyone that wanted to come. They had a girls’ dormitory and a boys’ dormitory and they could live there for a very small amount and get their education. Many people from surrounding communities, even some that had high schools [in their communities] came to Wheat because it was an accredited high school. After it became the high school, instead of Roane College, it was an accredited school and people would come and stay there so they could go to college. Many of the people, well I’ll name one family especially, all the Christenberry Knoxville lawyers and doctors came from the Wheat community, and the older ones had gone to Roane College.
INTERVIEWER: The area was primarily farms.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Yes, it was. In fact, there was practically nothing but farming. Then there were a lot of peach orchards that hired people during the harvest season and that gave us teenagers money to spend that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.
INTERVIEWER: Now if you went into the little town of Wheat itself, I am assuming there was a doctor in town.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Well for quite some time there was a doctor that served. There was a, let’s see, in my book I tell all of them. I remember Dr. Carl. Then they came to the place where they didn’t have one in the community. You had to go to Oliver Springs or Harriman, that was after traveling was no difficulty. For a long time Dr. Carl lived right in the community and Dr. Nice lived over toward Dyllis and he could get there in little to no time. He was a minister as well as a doctor.
INTERVIEWER: Did people go to the big towns like Knoxville a lot back then?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Oh yes. If you wanted to go and buy fine clothes, you had to go to Knoxville.
INTERVIEWER: What about the transportation back then? Where there a lot of cars on the road, or was it still horse and buggies?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Well there were a few horses. A few people rode horseback. Most of the people, when I was growing up, had a car. I’m 83, so that was a long time back there. I want to tell you something I remember as I was growing up. At a certain time of the year, and I guess it was the fall of the year, but I’m not for sure about that. They would have a drive of animals to the Knoxville market. Most of the time it was cattle. They would start, I don’t know where they started, but any farmer that added to it, added to it as they went up. My daddy would point it out to me and the way that they would was, they would have one person from that farm with their group of animals and they would go up by our house to Knoxville. One time, they had some sheep with them and I was just amazed. You know you drive cattle, but you lead sheep. It never had meant anything to me at all, when I had read the Bible about it in the 23rd Psalm. It had never meant anything to me until I saw that man leading his sheep instead of driving them.
INTERVIEWER: Would you like to talk about anything that I haven’t asked you so far?
MS. MONEYMAKER: Let me tell you a little funny thing that happened when I was in, they called it primary back then, instead of… you going to turn that on?
INTERVIEWER: It’s on.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Ok. I’m going to tell you a funny thing. They called it primary class then instead of kindergarten. They had desks that two students could sit in, and my first cousin and I were sitting together. Two of our friends, boy friends were sitting behind us. I will not give their names. Ms. Effie Driscoll was our teacher and Mary Bella and me got to laughing. So Ms. Effie took us out into the hall and asked what we were laughing about. We wouldn’t tell her. Three times that morning she took us out and the last time she made us sit down on the floor and sit there until lunch time. Now I’m going to tell her why we were laughing. The boys behind us were talking dirty talk, and we weren’t allowed to say those dirty words, so we weren’t able to tell Ms. Effie what we were laughing about.
INTERVIEWER: When kids grew up here did they stay here or did they move away.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Well many moved away. Many also inherited the family farm. Then people that would work in those peach orchards all year long, not the harvest time, but all year long, they usually lived in houses that were on the property of who owned the orchards. I think there were four big peach orchards and they were shipped. They went over to Dyllis and that’s where they put them on the train. You might be interested about what went on in the community after the Norris Dam was build. The community of Wheat was incorporated after that. They raised their crops and then put them all together and sold them all together, not just from each farmer, which gained them more. Also we would have, well, the agriculture and the Home Demonstration women. The men and women would meet once a month as transportation got better, the dormitories were not used and we made a community center out of it. We would have lunch together and talk about what we needed to learn to improve our manner of living and men talked about how to improve their harvest crops, so they could get more out of them when they sold them. I never questioned this. Somehow they all brought it all together to the community center and then it was shipped out so that it was all shipped out together. Then the money was paid out to each individual. I never questioned it, but it was all right.
INTERVIEWER: When you were 27, 28-years-old, you were told to move. What was your first reaction when you were told to pack up everything and leave?
MS. MONEYMAKER: We were sort of scared. I had been married, we had been married almost eight years at the time, and my husband was farming a farm. We didn’t know what we were going to do. To make it even worse, they didn’t tell us when they would pay us and how much we would be paid. That made it very difficult. It was also during the war time. We were selling eggs to a hatchery in Knoxville, which they came and collected each week and milk, cream off of the milk, cows too when it got time. Of course, that income was stopped when the government took it, because they were not allowed to come in. We were suppose to get out the last of December. I’m going to tell you an ugly thing I did. My husband was already working for the government here in Oak Ridge, but they still made us move. We didn’t get out by the last day of December ’42, so they served eviction papers. Well, tried to serve the eviction papers on us. We were expecting our first child. We had, I had an idea all of a sudden. I said to the man that was standing in front of my living room door, “Didn’t you know that there was a law in the state of Tennessee that says you could not evict a pregnant woman?” He was so scared that he took his papers with him and jumped off the front porch and they never came back. We didn’t get out until April of 1943. However, we had had our baby during that time and the doctor had to come from Oliver Springs and had to get a pass for me to get out to go to Harriman to have the baby. I don’t know what in the world they would have done if I had decided to have it a little quicker.
INTERVIEWER: So you were all ready, even though you hadn’t been moved out, you had already been isolated.
MS. MONEYMAKER: That’s right. The closest person still within the community, within the area was eight miles from us. Security would drive by and they would stop and stare at your house if somebody was in it. One day, they had cut off our water system and had filled up the well that was at our house and so I was having to use water from a spring branch across the road. One day, he was coming and he stopped and stared at me. I was washing over there in the branch. He said, “Lady, what are you doing?” Now, during that time of our life, your baby’s diapers were not pull ups. They were cloth. And I told him plain and flat what I was washing out of those diapers. I’ll not tell it on television, (laughter)
INTERVIEWER: Did they tell you why they were moving you out?
MS. MONEYMAKER: No they didn’t tell you anything but to get.
INTERVIEWER: Did anybody ever challenge those saying that they were going to take it to court?
MS. MONEYMAKER: I know one family who did take it to court. They went ahead and moved out and took it to court. They didn’t win anything. It went on about 18 months before it was settled. They would have been better off to have moved out and taken what they were giving them and let it go. It was about six to 12 months before anyone was notified as to what they would get. I would be amused to tell you, when I started to write that book, the Department of Energy gave me a list of the people who moved and the amount of acreage they had, but they would not let me see what they gave them for their land. Which was alright with me except that I happen to know that one of the places and I will not name it. (I would love to, but I won’t.) They got $33 an acre. If they were going to sell some of that land now, it would be something like $33,000 an acre. Oh, and let me tell you something about where X-10 sits. An agriculture teacher, Evan Hagger, owned it. It was a marvelous farm. Beside his cattle and so forth, he would tame wild animals. He taught at the Wheat High School agriculture and once a year he would bring his agriculture boys’ and the Home Demonstration girls’ classes over here to his farm and we would have a picnic for the day. We got to pet all those wild animals and he would tell us about everything. It was what you would call a perfect farm. When he had go to UT [University of Tennessee] having gone after he fought in World War I, they needed him up there one day. The man that was suppose to have demonstrated about how honeybees got sick. They asked Mr. Hagger to do it and he did it in a bathing suit with all those bees. They didn’t sting him.
INTERVIEWER: When you moved, where did you go?
MS. MONEYMAKER: I went to Rockwood. My mother’s father had died and my mother inherited a part of the farm that he had owned. Because none of us had any money or knew what we were going to have. We moved into the buildings that were there and of course, she took that part of the farm as her inheritance. We lived there 18 years. Then when the city took over from the government, because my husband was working for the city, we were required to move back in and we did.
INTERVIEWER: To Oak Ridge.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Did they ever give any indication to you maybe eventually you would get your land back?
MS. MONEYMAKER: They told us we would. When they no longer needed it, it would be returned to us.
INTERVIEWER: And obviously that didn’t happen.
MS. MONEYMAKER: Why of course not. That’s what you would expect from the government.
INTERVIEWER: You were never allowed back in.
MS. MONEYMAKER: No, where I grew up is behind restricted. I could have inherited it if I wanted it, but I don’t want it. I would be a miserable mess with a farm.
INTERVIEWER: Have you ever been back into that area at all?
MS. MONEYMAKER: We got permission to go, I think, twice. We went once so that my niece, who now lives with me, could go back in.
INTERVIEWER: Anything else you would want to tell us about.
MS. MONEYMAKER: I could tell you a whole lot more, but I won’t. I would love to tell you some of the dirty stuff. But that wouldn’t do.
INTERVIEWER: Do you detect any bitterness toward the government for being taken off your land?
MS. MONEYMAKER: No, there is no bitterness.
[Break in video]
MS. MCCALL-ELY: Are you ready?
INTERVIEWER: Barbara, tell me exactly where you grew up?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: I grew up in the K-25 area. My granddaddy’s Smith Sellers’ farm. My home place was 200 years old. It was started by Alexander Smith, which, just back in the mountain there, they had just put a hovel there. Then when his daughter, my great-grandmother, came with her husband there, they added some logs and made a little bit better home. Then in front of that, when my granddaddy and grandmother, Smith Sellers and his wife came, they put in some wood, of course, and built more on the home because they had a bigger family. Then, when I was little, they had added more onto the house. We had an upstairs, as well as a big basement where we kept all the potatoes, and Granddaddy kept blackberries, well, I guess you would call it wine now, but it was blackberries fermented. My brother and I went down there one time and got so drunk we couldn’t get up the steps. But anyway, we liked that blackberry wine. It was supposed to be used medicinally, but it wasn’t. But anyway, and we had, in other words a three story home. We had an old spring house that we kept our milk in. It had artesian springs under it. We went to, we kept our milk and butter in there. To me, we had a beautiful home. It was 200 years old. So when my great-grandmother had to leave in 1943, she was in her 80’s. It was difficult for her. It was her granddaddy’s place originally, and she never quite understood why she had to leave, even though my granddaddy said, “Ma, we got to go.” And he would say to us kids, as the government would come in and knock on our walls. I don’t know why. They wanted to see how sound our houses were. They would knock on them. My brother, Barry, was not very nice, but he kicked one on the shin and said, “Get out of my house.” But anyway, when we started to leave home, my brother and I wanted to take the “Edgewood” sign from our home place because that was put up there by our folks. We were at the edge of several woods. My brother said, “Granddaddy, lift me up and let us get the sign. We’ll keep that.” As Granddaddy lifted him up, a government man came and said, “You can’t have that. It’s in our pictures.” I guess that’s the reason my brother never comes home. He can’t stand it. Anyway, we moved to Rockwood, the Cartive area of Rockwood. When we stepped on the porch where my, (thank goodness, my great-grandfather Stubbs had some property and some land, and he moved a renter out of there) when my brother and I stepped on the porch the first time, it gave way, under our feet. This was not something that we could understand. They had given us $39 an acre for our home and we had to go there because we hadn’t even been paid, and didn’t know when we’d get paid. But Granddaddy kept saying this was going to bring our boys home. Sidney Arnold was killed shortly thereafter. Gene and I said to Granddaddy, “I thought this was going to bring Sidney and all of them home, and now Sidney won’t come home.” Granddaddy said, “The Lord knows best and we must live with that.” I was only a teenager. They said teenagers have stress now. But I still enjoy my mountains. I went to Texas. I went to Oklahoma. When I came back to my mountains, I was home. I live in Anderson County now, but I can cross the line into Roane County and I’m home. We have a homecoming every year. Many tears are shed at George Jones Memorial Baptist Church. My age group doesn’t come because they are hurt. They are angry, but they don’t understand that we must still have a part of what was our forefathers. So we gather there and we have a good time. We have services and then eat, talk and [inaudible]. One person said to me this year, “I’d hate to start rolling down that hill like we use to do many years ago.” I said, I’d also hate to try to [inaudible] myself down in the George Jones’ Baptist Church, and go to sleep, as I did when we had three week revivals in Wheat. Everybody loved everybody else. My grandmother use to say, “Don’t say anything bad about anybody. You’re kin to all of them.” But my aunt found Joe Moneymaker and he wasn’t kin to us, so she married him. But anyway, we were just a big family. When somebody would be sick, everybody went. Everybody took care of the crops around in our area. When it was scattered, we were so ill at ease, scared because our community was isolated from big towns. We went to Harriman every six months. We went to Oliver Springs when we had to have a doctor. That wasn’t very often. Grandmother used things like kerosene and coal oil for healing our hurts. My brother went across a rock, a little ravine type of thing and he cut his head open all the way. Grandmother just washed it out real good with coal oil and put some carbolic salve on it and kept dressing it every day. He still got the scar, but he lived. We didn’t have tetanus shots. We grew great big gardens. Grandmother put up great big things in the smoke house. She had shelves in there to put all kinds of vegetables and fruits. Granddaddy had many apple trees, peach trees, we had peach orchards. We had mulberry trees, which if you crawled up in them, you got the mulberries on you and you got a whipping with a peach tree or hickory switch from that. You know, it was a beautiful place. I never had to worry about if I wanted to scream and holler and run, and ride horseback. I could do it in my home place. Well, when we went to the Cartive area, that was city, and we could no longer do that because all the cars were going lickity split. I couldn’t remember being very comfortable. We would get out and lay down in the front yard which was a rolling hill and we would watch the lightning bugs. Granddaddy told us about the man in the moon and we’d find the big dipper and so forth. Everybody loved the Lord and they went by the way He told them. I guess that the strength of the Lord took us through. My great-grandmother Sellers died in 1945, which was two years after she had to leave her home place. She said, “I might as well go home to the Lord because I don’t have a home here. I no longer have a home.” You see, my uncle was a fire department man, and he tried to get us passes to go home, but they were burying some stuff at our home area, so they wouldn’t let us in. I’ve never been back home.
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MS. MCCALL-ELY: A man told me, a government man told me the other day that he would get a pass and take me pretty close to home. I’m looking forward to that. I will really like to look and see if I can find my cedar tree at the grainery, my cedar tree at the garage, my big maple tree in my front yard. It was hard. It still hurts. I’m no longer angry with the government. My brother served in the Army, the Navy for 28 years, served in the post office for 15 years. I’m a nurse because when I was little, I had a lot of sickness and I loved my Dr. Hicker, and he said you’re going to be my little nurse one day. So I’m a nurse. I think we did pretty well. We got lawyers, doctors, scientists, firemen, policemen. Marvin Stonecipher just passed away. He was sort of my uncle since he married an aunt of mine. He was in security. You know they had to use the men that knew the property around here because those Yankees would get lost in our hills and couldn’t find their way back to where they belonged. So they used Marvin Stonecipher, Joe Moneymaker, Red Moneymaker, some of them that climbed those hills many times. They used them to find the way back home because the Yankees just didn’t know how to get here. That was the bad thing about it. We found all these people coming from the North, and you know I’m southern, so it was a little bit hard to say, “Now they sell our land for thousands of dollars but we got $39 an acre.” I don’t even remember. It was like in the ‘50’s when my granddaddy got the money for it. I do not resent the government mostly because we needed to be spread out to tell others what we learned by being in the Wheat Community. We love home. We’re gradually retiring and come all the way from overseas, California, Washington. All of us are sort of finding a place in Kingston, in Oak Ridge, in Knoxville, in Harriman. We’re coming home because there is a lot of us. I’m 66 and there’s a lot of my age group that were at the Sunday Homecoming, October 5. We were so happy to be there. Fifty years will be 2000. I graduated in 1950 and we’re going to make our George Jones Church hill have our colors of gold and blue. We hope to have a big day that day because we don’t know how long… The government’s been very good about mowing our cemeteries, keeping our church up. They help us with our church so that we can have a homecoming. Many people think of our church as the haunted church. It is not haunted to me, but they do damage our church and vandalize our church. I’m so thankful that New Bethel can be here because that gives me something. Dyllis gives me something. So, you know, things happen to people, but it says you don’t stray far from where you began, and that’s me. I’m an Ely now, but I belong to Guy McCall who lived there. His daddy had a peach orchard in the area. My mother, of course, it was her that had the 200 year old home. She worked at Y-12 when it first opened. She was one of the first ones to work in there, Winnie Sellers-McCall. She didn’t have protective clothing when she worked as a statistician there, like they do nowadays. But it’s ok. I lost her in 1984. They said they didn’t know what kind of damage had been done, but apparently something had been done because they had to do a lot of things to get into her bloodstream to take care of her. People do not realize when they made the bell, to thank and be peaceful with Japan, it was difficult to look at it, and when it gongs each night, I think about K.B. Johnson, who was at Pearl Harbor. His brother was on shore and knew his big brother was dying. It did a lot to C.T. Johnson, but we lived through it. We thank the government for what they do now. We’re very pleased with ORNL [Oak Ridge National Laboratory] because they want us to tell our story. We thank them so very much.
INTERVIEWER: Obviously you had a lot of friends, you were a young girl, you had a lot of friends…
MS. MCCALL-ELY: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Did a lot of those friends disperse to other places, or did you pretty much stay in touch?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We did not stay in touch because it was difficult to write a letter without crying. We sort of decided, “We’ll just forget about that.” We have some pictures of my class, I was in the fifth grade when we left. My brother was in the seventh grade, and we have some pictures and we do, as I said, try to get the people that graduate even beyond the time. A lot of them were in Harriman, Wartburg, Coalfield, Knoxville, but I guess I was the furthest away in Texas. However, the Lee Arnold family went to Washington state. Ms. Eula taught up there for many years. Ms. Effie Thacker was in the Kingston area. She’s gone. But a lot of people settled in Kingston, or Harriman and Dyllis area, Sugar Grove Valley. There was many of them. The Stoneciphers some of them settled there. But it was like when we come back, we always start looking for so-and-so. Of course, we’re all married, so it’s a little bit hard to find the girls. But this year I had 10 of my classmates that were at homecoming. That’s the time, that’s when it’s so great because that’s the time. We know it happens the first Sunday of October and everybody comes and says, “I’m Barbara McCall-Ely. Who are you?” I found Frances May; Prisilla May; Ernest Weaver; the Jones twins- Myrtle and Mary; Allen Murray; the Qualls- John, Sue, Pauline, Patty; the Magill twins. It’s almost like there was no time between. We don’t talk about when we had to leave. We talk about how happy we are to be back. It’s like Edwin Arnold said at our banquet this year, “It’s just like old home week.” We used to gather at churches, pray, sing, take our troubles and talk to each other. When we would have Roane County fairs, everybody would come from a long ways in the wagons and with the horses. We didn’t have money to run the cars. My granddaddy had a car in the garage all of my little life, but he didn’t have money to run it. He barely made… If we didn’t have our gardens and our peach orchard, and the things, the hogs and the chickens, we would not have survived the Depression. But we did have that and we thanked God that after we left there, WPA [Works Progress Administration] helped my uncle get a job before we left and then when we left he was a fireman. I think it’s so funny, in 1943, of April, they had to leave you-know-what. When the government left in 1961, my uncle and aunt had to move back in, not too far away from where we were. So they moved us out and then they made my uncle and aunt move back in. My aunt was real angry. She said she just couldn’t hardly abide that. But anyway, we are happy. We still remember our forefathers. We have many, many pictures. We have histories. My aunt’s book of We Call it Wheat has been so publicized and great-great-grandchildren ask her to please have it published again. So she did, 300 copies. We’ve got about 150 left. But she tells about all of our cemeteries, all the ones that graduated, all the families that were in the Wheat area, and it’s something they can hold onto because, you see, we don’t have houses to hold onto. We don’t have land to hold onto. So we have to hold onto pictures and books. City Behind the Fence didn’t make us very happy because we didn’t want the fence. I can remember when the gates slammed behind us after they searched us. My brother and I look back and say goodbye. There will never be another home. So that was home. It’s still home. I can’t see it, but I know my mountains are here and they protect me from harm.
INTERVIEWER: Do you still go back to the cemeteries a lot?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We go to the cemeteries. I have relatives in the Common Presbyterian Cemetery. All we have left of our Common Presbyterian Church, is a cemetery and a monument that is up close to where you turn off to where you go to Lenoir City. That has part of the wall that was taken from our Common Presbyterian Church. It has been placed in front of the monument and the government makes it easy for us to see. So when people come, they say, “There’s the Common Presbyterian Church.” My great-grandfather, Sam Stubbs, gave that property, and then my granddaddy, great-granddaddy Sellers gave the property and was one of the deacons in the Baptist church. You see, we didn’t have a lot of… Baptists, Common Presbyterian, Methodists all worshipped together. We didn’t know we were different. We just all loved each other. One Sunday we would have a Baptist preacher, and the next Sunday we would have a Common Presbyterian, and then the next Sunday we would have a Methodist. My aunt said the next Sunday we didn’t have anything but Sunday school, and they were very happy about that. But we have so often gone to cemeteries and so many times the tombstones have been knocked over by vandals. Each year, Don Watson, some of the men, go and straighten up and replace tombstones. We have also had them cleaned off because they’ve been in bad array. But we go to our cemeteries, and to a certain extent, we say thank you for our heritage. Crawford Cumberland Presbyterian is taken care of and mowed by the government. Now the Scott Cabbage is not mowed. It’s suppose to be the City of Oak Ridge’s business, and it’s not mowed. They can’t hardly find their tombstones. But that’s too bad. But the George Jones Cemetery and the Cumberland Presbyterian, our Dyllis cemetery are very well kept. Dyllis keeps their’s pretty much, but we do visit and that’s a part of going home because you know it was very hard when my Grandma Sellers died in 1945. They weren’t going to let us bring her back to lay her with Grandpa. But someone was kind enough and my uncle being a fireman, and my Marvin Stonecipher being security, we got in and put Grandma there. Now there are many of the younger people, the Williams are buried there. So we didn’t get to put the death date of my Grandma Sellers, (and then my Grandpa Stubbs who died in ’41) on the tombstones until just a few years ago. My aunt and I had Mr. Summers to go over there from Oliver Springs, go over there and put their death dates, because you did well to bury them. You couldn’t do anything else. So we do visit there and some people like the Embries still see their area. I can see where the Moneymaker’s trail went to. I can see where the road to that is. I can see where Mr. Walker McKinney’s road goes, but I can’t go in it. You know, gates bar things. So maybe one of these days before I die, I’ll be able to see the twin springs on Mr. Walker McKinney’s place, and maybe I’ll be able to see the Moneymaker area. But until they put the gates down, then we have to wait and bide our time, but it’s getting better.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds as though there were a lot of different crops planted here, they just didn’t plant corn or wheat.
MS. MCCALL-ELY: No.
INTERVIEWER: It sounds like there were a lot of different crops.
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We had tobacco. We had wheat crops. Mr. Jack Rather, he had a big ole combine, and when they’d come, all the people would come and harvest it according to families. Then that family’s wife had to get the dinner ready. I can remember Grandmother fixing big dinners for the harvest hands. I always liked to get in the way and the threshing’s would get all over me and Granddaddy would scream, “You’re going to get in the way.” But you know, Mr. Jack Rather would always say, “Oh, come on up here, Barbara. You can ride with me.” He would take me up and let me ride around with the threshing of the wheat. We had also in the corn fields, we had what we called corn field peas, and we would harvest those. That was down where the bottom was, which was sort of, well, people might call it a river now, but it was a pond to us. But I used to go and my brother and I were left home some, (because Granddaddy carried the mail and Grandmother went to do the nursing for Dr. Hacker, because he couldn’t always get around) my brother and I were left one time and a storm, ice storm come up. Our old Blue, our old cow, got her tail stuck in the pond and it was freezing around it. So we had to cut off part of her tail to get her home. But that was all right. We made it and we brought her home and we doctored her up real good. Granddaddy said, “You did a good job.” But lots of times, you know, we didn’t have to worry about people bothering us because nobody would bother us then. Also, we had, when we put tobacco out, all of us worked at it. You see, we did things as a family, Granddaddy, Dot Moneymaker, Joe, my brother and I, and my grandmother. All of us put out tobacco slips. We put those out and it was real aggravating, because you had to be just right at putting it in a certain hole. Granddaddy would then come and not stamp it too hard. Granddaddy had his crops according to the Almanac, and he use to know exactly what he was suppose to plant, the potatoes, and the corn, and the peas. So he really did a good job of raising things. As I said, the apple and peach orchards, we had all kinds of apples- winesaps, yellow apples. All kinds.
INTERVIEWER: So you didn’t have to go to the stores that much.
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We didn’t go to the store. We went to Mr. Chester Watson’s store for like kerosene, and, oh, you got a Coke. Granddaddy used to have, he used a dump truck and would carry grain, I mean sand and stuff, and gravel, for pavement on roads. We’d go and get some cheese and a cracker from a cracker barrel. We’d get in there and eat that cheese and cracker. So, we went to Chester Watson’s store, but as I said, we didn’t go to Harriman, or Oliver Springs but once or twice a year. Now if you got a tooth ache… I can remember when Granddaddy fell out of the barn and hurt himself. He stuck a tobacco stub in his groin area and my uncle sawed off part of it. He said, “Leave it there because he’ll bleed to death before we get him to Harriman.” So we left the stub in there. But Granddaddy had fallen and I know we were very afraid that Granddaddy wouldn’t make it down that long ways to Harriman. It was a long ways when you were sick.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go by car?
MS. MCCALL-ELY: We went by car many times, of course, it was the way we went to Sunday school and things. John Watson got a bus, and that was a school bus as well as a church bus. If one person, Mr. Watson always had a car, and he would take us places. Of course, you know when you were at school, you walked to school and that was three miles from my home place. So you did it through snow. I was a short legged things, so everybody had to bother, “Where’s Barbara?” They would come back and pick me up out of snow. Of course, I got carried around by the Cooper boys and stuff like that when you got in the snow when you were little. But anyway, everybody looked after everybody else. So we didn’t have a lot of conveniences, as I said. My granddaddy had a car. It was there. When I was real tiny, apparently I rode up in the back close to the glass because it was just a two seater, and they put my brother and I back there, so, we could see out there. We’d tell Granddaddy and we’d ask him, “Granddaddy, are we going to get up that hill?” Because sometimes it was muddy and we went to Rockwood to see Grandpa and Grandma Stubbs and it was hard to get down there. It took us all day to get down there. We’d spend the night and come back the next day. But that was just in Rockwood, or Cartive area. Sometimes my uncle who worked on the Norris Dam, he came home every weekend. He and my Aunt Dorothy came home, and they would take us places like to the movies. Of course, the ones that dated, when they dated, they usually had some little kids that were in the backseat and if they smooched or something, we’d snicker. But anyway, they took us to shows down in Harriman. We went to football games. Yeah. We went to those. We didn’t particularly like Oliver Springs, but anyway, we were sort of enemies with them. But anyway, we’d go to football games. Basketball games we always went to. We had barn dances. Now if you haven’t been to a barn dance… Now I learned to square dance when I was real tiny, but anyway, my brother and I did good square dancing. We were Christians, but we still did our square dances. Granddaddy would open the barn. He had about the biggest barn around and he’d open the barn and we’d have a barn square dance. Then we would go out and we’d eat. Oh, of course, you know when molasses-making time, now that was a good time to have square dancing. We had our own cane and Granddaddy had a place there where the horses went around, and around, and around, and crushed the cane, and then it made juice. Then you went down to the little branch that went through our property and you had vats there. So you put that juice in there and you’d make your molasses. Grandmother and Granddaddy would make our lard from the hog stuff. They’d also use those branches for skinning hogs. Then of course, the smoke house… Now you had to keep the smoke going there and we had smoke house. Part of it was Grandmother’s canning area, but part of it was for smoking hams and bacon. You know, my granddaddy, it came in handy because Dr. Hacker couldn’t buy a ham at the store. It was too high. So he would take a ham when he came and saw my brother and I when we were sick. My brother had asthma real bad. So he got sick real often and I had rheumatic fever. I remember Mr. Littleton dying with typhoid fever. But we had a Dr. Fly, and believe me he could bite you with a shot, but everybody got the typhoid shot after Mr. Littleton died. You know, we learned by experience. We were taught by experience. I’m so sorry for children today that are confined to a little tiny sidewalk because I had many places. I remember killing an opossum one time. I thought, my brother and I knocked it in the head with a hammer. Of course, we did that with little pigs too and Granddaddy said, “That’s not what I want to slaughter.” But anyway, we got about three of his little pigs before he got to us. But anyway, we used a hammer on that old opossum. We went home to tell Granddaddy we got an opossum, and he better have Grandmother bake it. Well, when we got back, he said, “I don’t think you killed it.” “Yes, we did.” Well, the opossum wasn’t there when we took Granddaddy back. But anyway, you know, I talk about my granddaddy and grandmother. My mother and daddy were divorced before I was born. Mother went to Knoxville, and my daddy was in North Carolina. But my grandmother and granddaddy and my uncle, Joe and Dot Moneymaker, were the ones that raised me. My great-grandmother, at 81, taught me how to skip a rope. Of course, she broke her wrist while she was doing it, but she taught me how to do it. So anyway, nevertheless, we just had a very close knit family. Nobody, but nobody neglected any child. I was just, I could go eat at Ms. Marjorie Lee’s then. She’s Barger now. Ms. Frank [inaudible], I could go eat at her house. Wherever we were. I grew up with Gene Lee and Barbara, J.W. My brother’s name was Gene and my name is Barbara, and Grandmother would come out and say, “Barbara and Gene,” and four of us would come. Ms. Marjorie would go out and would yell, “Barbara and Gene,” and four of us would come. You know, we went in the woods where you would go and lift up stuff off of fallen trees and you’d find bugs there, and worms there. You know, we learned all about those. But you know, I had a free childhood, until the age of 11. It was never burdened. Grandmother gave us a little whipping before we went out. She gave us one at lunch. She gave us one at night time, and in between, if she caught us doing something, she gave us another little switching. But you know we were always outside doing something. Horses, animals, little kitties, little chickens. We would watch and we were very careful that we didn’t step in the place where Grandmother boiled the sheets and stuff in real hot water in a great big old black kettle. If you stepped in that, believe me you didn’t stay there very long, because it was hot for a long time. But Grandmother thought that she had to bleach everything out and then you ironed everything too. I learned to iron washcloths, believe it or not. But my grandmother gave me one of those irons that you have to set on the stove. You better be careful because you can get burned that way too. But anyway, I’d iron the washcloths and the towels. Then I finally graduated. At the time, my uncle was a fireman for Oak Ridge. I was ironing his white shirts and I’d get 10 cents a shirt, and that was great money for us. Many times Granddaddy would give us one little pig and that was our little pig and we could keep that. Then when Granddaddy slaughtered it or sold it, or whatever, we got the money from it. I can remember Granddaddy sugar curing ham. I can remember Grandmother and him fixing sausage, just enough sage to make it good, and then Grandmother would bake some of it and then put it in a jar and keep it for a long time. They would fix bacon just right. There’s nothing like red-eye gravy. Red-eye gravy is great and it doesn’t take much, you know, to make some red-eye gravy. Just a little bit of water and some of that ham… juice, is what we called it. We liked cornbread. I didn’t know there was white bread until I went to Cartive. Grandmother always baked our bread on Saturdays. Bread and pies and cakes were baked on Saturday. I didn’t know you had to buy white bread until I was 13-years-old. That experience teaches me that I can do anything if I set my mind to it. If the Lord’s with me, and he’s been with me so many years, and without that, without our Christian heritage and our teaching… Our teachers, Martha Matts, Effie, well, she was Driscoll, Thacker, Ada Driscoll Murray, Ms. Della McKinney, those women loved us children, and intended for us to learn to read, write, and arithmetic. Oh, Catherine…
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MS. MCCALL-ELY: …was rough on arithmetic. My little knuckles stayed red all the time because I wasn’t very much on arithmetic. I didn’t like fractions and Ms. Catherine Gallaher would hit my knuckles with a ruler and say, “You got to learn those. Your momma was good at arithmetic and your brother was good, now you got to be good.” But I wasn’t very good at arithmetic, but that was okay. Ms. Ina Phillips Alcorn, also, was one of my teachers. We were very upset. She married a foreigner. She married a man from Oliver Springs, and we didn’t really like that. But anyway, she left on Christmas holiday as Ms. Ina Phillips, one of my kinfolks. It was some of my granddaddy’s kinfolks. She came back Mrs. Cheekwood. We didn’t even like the name, and you can imagine what we called her. But anyway, Ms. Ina Phillips was a great person. She was the last one to teach me at home. I was real upset because I didn’t get to go to Ms. Eula Arnold. She was in the seventh grade, and of course, Mr. Walker McKinney was up there in high school, and I didn’t get them to teach me. I was really looking forward to my kinfolks teaching me, but I didn’t get Ms. Eula. My brother almost did. He was in the seventh and Ms. Eula was teaching the eighth, but he didn’t manage it. Of course, we didn’t get to Mr. Walker, for him to teach us history. But he was a history buff. I loved my young life. I loved my Wheat, Roane County. I still love it. You can take the person out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the person. You don’t take where you were born, and in 14 years, you don’t take it away. I enjoy coming and talking about how beautiful my home place was. It wasn’t little shacks, folks. Dexter Christianberry said, “The shacks,” when he spoke. We didn’t invite him back to speak at George Jones Memorial Baptist Church because we have pictures of our homes. They weren’t shacks. Yes, we had shacks, but our homes, our big homes were good. They just shoved them off the hillside with a bulldozer, and they wouldn’t let us have the sign that said “Edgewood.” They just shoved it off right after we left. Thank goodness. Some people had to watch the bulldozers shove it off. We didn’t. I thank God that I didn’t have to watch that.
INTERVIEWER: Are you finished?
[Break in video]
INTERVIEWER: Velma Blank, you grew up on a farm [inaudible]?
MS. BLANK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: You grew up on a farm in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s, ‘40’s maybe? Tell us about life…
MS. BLANK: I was born 1916.
INTERVIEWER: 1916. Tell us what farm life was like back in those days.
MS. BLANK: We just farmed. We didn’t have tractors and things like we do now. We had teams of mules and stuff like that to… and we went out with a hoe to clean the weeds out of our gardens and corn fields, and places. We mowed our hay with a mowing machine and raked it with the mules, and everything. We just had a good farm living. We grew a lot of what we ate, and everything, you know. But we’d save, we’d have a wheat crop and stuff like that and we’d sell stuff to buy the staples we’d need for the year, you know. But just to get up early on a morning, and when we were in school, we’d have to go out and milk about two cows before we went to school, carry up water for Momma. We just worked from daylight maybe until the sun went down on the farm when we were out of school. We all went to school and most of us graduated from high school. So we just, there were 10 in my family and then we just had a good farm living. And for fun, why, we played in the yard, played ball, played horseshoes, I don’t know what all we done, marbles. We just had to entertain one another because we didn’t have all the places to go. Of course our church life came first. [Inaudible] would see that we all got to church. We just lived like that. It was one of the happier times of my life because… we weren’t afraid to go nowhere because people didn’t bother children then like they do now. Now, where we live, we have to stay in the house with our doors locked, suspecting someone to come in, you know. It wasn’t nothing like that when we lived in the country up here. We just had all our friends, we had a good life.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of crops did you grow on your farm?
MS. BLANK: Corn, hay, sorghum molasses cane to make molasses. We had pea patches where we picked peas, just a lot of stuff like that, sweet potatoes and [inaudible] potatoes, and we had an apple orchard with about 60 trees in it. We’d put, we had a cellar down under our barn and we put the apples down there. We could go down there at Christmas time and open a barrel of those apples, you know, for Christmas. We’d put walnuts and popcorn and everything down there. We just, we’d get our friends and we’d have all that to munch on when they came. Our house was the stopping place for the young people then, because there were so many of us. By the time all of us drug in a friend, we had a house full.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have hired hands at your house, or just the family?
MS. BLANK: No, we done it ourselves. We didn’t have any hired help.
INTERVIEWER: Had your farm been over several generations?
MS. BLANK: Well, my father inherited it from his father. He had four sisters and he was the only boy, so the home place went to him. So, but when we lived there, they just gave us about 10 days to get out of there. We had to sell our animals and we had cats and dogs, teams of mules. We had about three teams of mules, calves and things like that we had to get rid of, and find a place to live. We didn’t find a place to live until we got to Rockwood. We rented a place and about six months after that we found a house we could buy, and we bought that. We’ve lived there ever since.
INTERVIEWER: How did your father tell you, you were going to move? What did he say to you? Did he bring the family together?
MS. BLANK: Well, really I was working in Rockwood when he, when they come and told him. I don’t know what he said and everything, but I guess they told him to do the best he could about getting out, I guess. That’s about the way it was.
INTERVIEWER: Was he bitter in any way?
MS. BLANK: No. No, he just knew there was nothing he could do about it.
INTERVIEWER: Did anybody tell him why he was being moved?
MS. BLANK: Well, we didn’t know it until the day that they were really going to take the land, the day they told him to move, but prior to that there was a big creek that ran through our farm and there were all these people down there taking samples of that creek. It’s White Oak Creek. It runs through that and they wouldn’t say nothing when Daddy would be down there talking to them. But anyhow, we heard later that they found uranium in that creek. It’s just down about a mile from here, our farm was, right over this way. So, that’s all we knew. They didn’t say nothing while they were surveying down there or nothing.
INTERVIEWER: What were you doing at the time? You said you were working in Rockwood.
MS. BLANK: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Were there a lot of people who were living here and working in other areas at the time?
MS. BLANK: I just got through graduating from high school, when I [inaudible] work. We felt like something was going to happen, you know, with the farm work. There wasn’t anything around here. In fact, there wasn’t anything for the young people to do. They might could do house work for people, or pick berries or something like that for people, but that’s all you could do. I went out to where I could find something else.
INTERVIEWER: You say the church was a focal point in your lives.
MS. BLANK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Other than Sunday worship service, what other activities took place in the church?
MS. BLANK: Well, I was the secretary for the Sunday school for two or three years. My mother taught, you know, they use to have a little card class if we would get any little children. My mother taught that class for a many number of years. We just, we had a good church life. Daddy didn’t go to church that often, but he insisted that we go. But after we moved to Rockwood, why he got in line with the church and everything and he was elected deacon to his church. He lived a good life. The trouble about him, he drank some and he just never did get that interested in church up here.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the move had something to do with that, taking him from his roots?
MS. BLANK: Yeah, because his people that he ran around with up here, you know, he didn’t have them with him. But I don’t think it was because of anybody taking a drink. It’s up to them. It’s their choice.
INTERVIEWER: Was there a lot of drinking in this area at the time?
MS. BLANK: We had hillbilly stills around here, and his friends and him had all the stills.
INTERVIEWER: This was going on during the prohibition and all that.
MS. BLANK: Yeah. He never did own none himself, but some of his friends did, you know.
INTERVIEWER: So if somebody wanted some, they knew…
MS. BLANK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: …how to get it. Did a lot of newcomers come into the area here? Were there new residents who moved down here?
MS. BLANK: Not too many from other places, but most of them were neighbors and everybody knew everybody, I reckon.
INTERVIEWER: A lot of people moved down into this area from being displaced at Norris Dam.
MS. BLANK: Yeah, but…
INTERVIEWER: Did you know any of them?
MS. BLANK: Oh, yeah. I knew them. They lived up in the upper end of here.
INTERVIEWER: How did they react to being told they had to move again?
MS. BLANK: They were good people, and they had their church over in their community. They were really good people. Some of their young people used to come over to our house on Saturday night and sit with us and play games and things. We knew them real well. The Prices and the Proffitts, four or five of the families, Ray Fields.
INTERVIEWER: Were they big families? Most the families big families around here?
MS. BLANK: Well, some of them didn’t have very many children. There were 10 in my family and I believe there were six in Mr. Cole’s family. Most of them had more than one.
INTERVIEWER: They always like to have boys to work on the farm.
MS. BLANK: Yeah. There were six boys and four girls in my family. Then Daddy, he raised two of his half-brothers. They lived with us.
INTERVIEWER: As a child, did you play games in the barn.
MS. BLANK: Yeah, we used to.
INTERVIEWER: What were some of the games you played in the barn?
MS. BLANK: Hide and seek, things like that. We had a big log barn, but I think Daddy built a new one before they took the land up. It wasn’t a log barn, but he built a log barn. We had two barns then. But because I had been down in Rockwood working before he built the other barn.
INTERVIEWER: Most of these farmers, that was their job. They were farmers. They didn’t have any other job?
MS. BLANK: Daddy had done logging for Mr. Grubb and he had his lumbering. He raised lumber for, at the other side of the Solway Bridge, there was a lumber yard on the left over there, and he raised lumber for him for a long time.
INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you, you grew up on a farm, and obviously a lot of times these days we have droughts. Did you all do anything special when there was a drought and the area was dry, as far as trying to protect your crops.
MS. BLANK: Well, ours was on that White Oak Creek. We didn’t have very many times that we had a drought. Daddy rented land on the Clinch River too, and we didn’t have very much trouble with that. We just…
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t have any irrigation system or anything like that.
MS. BLANK: No.
INTERVIEWER: How about your mother, she cared for 10 children. What was that like? Tell us about your mother.
MS. BLANK: Well, we all had our jobs to do. They gave us all a job to do and we done that job. We knew what was coming if we didn’t do them. That way, why, she didn’t have all that much to do. But I wonder sometimes how she got us all out to school every morning, to church. I just had one and I could hardly get him out.
INTERVIEWER: What age were you expected to start doing chores?
MS. BLANK: As quick as they were old enough to do something.
INTERVIEWER: Five or six maybe.
MS. BLANK: Yeah. I guess so. We usually did what they said for us to do because if we didn’t, why, there was a switch out there on the tree.
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever have problems around here with flooding, or tornadoes, that you can remember.
MS. BLANK: That creek was about 100 yards from our front porch, but I’ve seen it up half way to the porch. Used to when the school bus ran, and had come a storm, and that creek would get up, why, Daddy would get, we had a big red horse that we rode all the time. He’d get that horse and ford us across that creek, when it would storm and the school bus ran.
INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else that you would like to talk about that I haven’t asked?
MS. BLANK: I don’t know of anything. I just know that we had a good life on what time we lived up here.
INTERVIEWER: Do you miss…
MS. BLANK: I was 24 when I went to Rockwood to work.
INTERVIEWER: Do you miss living here after all these years?
MS. BLANK: Well, I like to come back home every once in a while, but I think we were better off when we got out of here, because we could have a better living and have more.
INTERVIEWER: Do you ever get a chance to go back to where you lived?
MS. BLANK: Yeah. I go back to this church over here, the Bethel Church, every year in May for homecoming. My mother and daddy are buried over in that cemetery.
INTERVIEWER: So you still get to go to their graves and [inaudible].
MS. BLANK: Yeah.
INTERVIEWER: Do you sometimes wish all these facilities would just go away and you could live like you did 60 years ago?
MS. BLANK: No. I think people need to have progress, don’t you think?
INTERVIEWER: So you weren’t bitter about the move?
MS. BLANK: No. Still, we didn’t get the price for our land we needed to get. I’m still not mad about it because they didn’t pay as much for the land.
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INTERVIEWER: Dot Anderson Bussell, we get a lot of questions on a public tour that we have about the cemetery, the graves that have covers over them behind Bethel Valley Church. Now, be looking at the camera when you answer this. Tell me what that’s all about.
MS. BUSSELL: There was a Mrs. Sherwood that had a baby that died at birth, and it started raining just right after they got the child in the grave, and she was very upset. So she had her family members to go to the cemetery and make the cover for the grave. That’s how it was started. Like that.
INTERVIEWER: So all of those graves are actually infants.
MS. BUSSELL: Right. They’re all infants.
INTERVIEWER: Now when we take the bus by the church every day, we always point out the stone marker that says, “In Memoriam of Bethel Valley Church.” How did that stone marker get erected there?
MS. BUSSELL: Ok, on our last meeting, the church was suppose to be torn down. So we had the stone erected so many feet behind the church, which it states on the stone, that it would be torn down, we thought it would be torn down. That’s the reason why they took the money that was in the treasurey and erected the stone.
INTERVIEWER: How quickly did it take to get that stone erected? Obviously, you didn’t have much time.
MS. BUSSELL: No, we had very little time. In fact, our families were two of the first ones, our grandparents and my mother and dad were the first ones that moved out because our home. We only had about 30 days to move out, less than 30 days to move out, due to the fact that my grandparents’ home was made into the Personnel Office, right here at the corner of first and Bethel Valley. I was born across the street from that. Our house became the Fire Department and my grandparents’ house was the Personnel Office.
INTERVIEWER: How big a house did you have?
MS. BUSSELL: My grandparents had a very large house, which I have a picture of it, that’s on file here, and our house was a four, five room house. My grandparents’ was about eight and it had a porch all the way around. In fact, my great-grandparents are the ones that lived in the house before I was born and they are all buried at the Bethel Cemetery.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have electricity at your house?
MS. BUSSELL: No, and an outhouse, too. So, it was a simple life. I went to a one-room school and I can recall going down, and everybody drank out of the same dipper, going down and getting the water from the spring and bringing it back up. In the first grade, I developed rheumatic fever, and I did not get to finish the first grade here in Oak Ridge, which was Wheat, Tennessee.
INTERVIEWER: So, you didn’t have a telephone either.
MS. BUSSELL: No, and that brings up another subject. They would come and thresh the wheat. So we never knew when they were coming, but we always tried to, you know, get things ready for them, because we had no phone and they would just show up. We would hear when they were in the neighborhood, or something. So we had to provide three meals a day for all the people that came with the machinery to run it. That also meant that we cleaned out our straw beds and we had clean straw in our straw beds for another year.
INTERVIEWER: When you were home at night reading, how did you have light in the house? You had no electricity, so…
MS. BUSSELL: We had a kerosene light. Now when our power is off, I have lit a kerosene lamp, and I realize you can’t see very well. So most of, we had games and stuff like that, but usually we were tired after being out all day. We did not, we had chores to do. We did not come home, when we came home, we had corn to hoe out, to, you know, space it out. We had potatoes to dig and we had things like that. When we came home, we just didn’t have nothing to do. So, you were ready to go to bed when it came night time.
INTERVIEWER: So when the sun went down, it was time…
MS. BUSSELL: …to hit the hay.
INTERVIEWER: Nobody was staying up until 11 o’clock.
MS. BUSSELL: No, not to watch the news. (laughter)
INTERVIEWER: How many people were in your family?
MS. BUSSELL: I had one brother and two sisters, and my mother and father. My brother died 13 years ago, and he was the oldest. So, there was only four of us, but we had, I guess some of the other members, (I’m the oldest member of the committee,) and some of the others said we had more luxury, but I guess we did and I didn’t realize it. We didn’t act it either because we had cars before anybody else did.
INTERVIEWER: But no asphalt roads?
MS. BUSSELL: No, and my grandfather Anderson was road commissioner and I know some of the roads that still exist over here that go toward Bear Creek from Bethel Valley, he laid off that road. They asked him one day if he was drunk, which he did not drink, but they asked him if he was drunk when he laid off that road.
INTERVIEWER: You went to Knoxville when you were young?
MS. BUSSELL: We moved just off Hardin Valley, on Coward Mill Road, which I still own the farm house.
INTERVIEWER: When you left here?
MS. BUSSELL: Yes, and we were the first ones that left and we moved out real soon. I mean real, real soon, because they were wanting our houses for these particular things. So they asked us to move very fast. So we sold most of the cattle and we moved to a much smaller farm, and we did not get paid until about four months later.
INTERVIEWER: What I was getting at, when you were younger, and still living here, I’m assuming with a vehicle, you did go to Knoxville…?
MS. BUSSELL: No. No, my mother did, but I did not.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea how long that took, the drive from here to Knoxville?
MS. BUSSELL: Well, my grandfather was the one that was looking for us another place to live, and I can recall that he would be gone for a couple of days looking, because land was scarce around here, and we wanted to stay. He would stay with his niece that lived between Knoxville and here. But my mother often talked about going into Knoxville. Her father had the Davis Grocery Store that was at the corner of Bear Creek Valley Road, right there at the entrance to Bear Creek Valley. She talked about that they would go up into Knoxville to pick up merchandise for the store.
INTERVIEWER: So they were gone for the whole day.
MS. BUSSELL: Yes. So, they had to get up early and do their chores and milk the cows and things like that. I know how to milk a cow.
INTERVIEWER: What time did you get up in the morning?
MS. BUSSELL: Usually around six or so because I was smaller, but my brother and sister got up earlier than I did.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you had to move?
MS. BUSSELL: Had to move, I was born in 1935 and had to move in ’43.
INTERVIEWER: So you were about 8-years-old.
MS. BUSSELL: Yes.
[End of Interview]